This work presents a novel landing assistance system (LAS) capable of locating a drone for a safe landing after its inspection mission. The location of the drone is achieved by a fusion of ultra-wideband (UWB), inertial measurement unit (IMU) and magnetometer data. Unlike other typical landing assistance systems, the UWB fixed sensors are placed around a 2 × 2 m landing platform and two tags are attached to the drone. Since this type of set-up is suboptimal for UWB location systems, a new positioning algorithm is proposed for a correct performance. First, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm is used to calculate the position of each tag, and then both positions are combined for a more accurate and robust localisation. As a result, the obtained positioning errors can be reduced by 50% compared to a typical UWB-based landing assistance system. Moreover, due to the small demand of space, the proposed landing assistance system can be used almost anywhere and is deployed easily.

In order to reduce the accident risk in road construction and maintenance, this paper proposes a novel solution for road-worker safety based on an untethered real-time locating system (RTLS). This system tracks the location of workers in real time using ultra-wideband (UWB) technology and indicates if they are in a predefined danger zone or not, where the predefined safe zone is delimited by safety cones. Unlike previous works that focus on road-worker safety by detecting vehicles that enter into the working zone, our proposal solves the problem of distracted workers leaving the safe zone. This paper presents a simple-to-deploy safety system. Our UWB anchors do not need any cables for powering, synchronisation, or data transfer. The anchors are placed inside safety cones, which are already available in construction sites. Finally, there is no need to manually measure the positions of anchors and introduce them to the system thanks to a novel self-positioning approach. Our proposal, apart from automatically estimating the anchors’ positions, also defines the limits of safe and danger zones. These features notably reduce the deployment time of the proposed safety system. Moreover, measurements show that all the proposed simplifications are obtained with an accuracy of 97%.

Real time location systems (RTLSs) are becoming more relevant in a more data driven economy and society due to their wide range of application cases. When the location of an object needs to be tracked with high accuracy, ultra wideband (UWB) technology is usually the best option. Nevertheless, UWB ranging estimates are not completely immune to some sources of error such as non line of sight (NLOS) or multipath conditions. Thus, this paper proposes a real-time classification model based on machine learning (ML) to predict if received ranging estimates are in line of sight (LOS) or NLOS conditions and discard those in NLOS. However, it is also shown that classifying measurements as LOS or NLOS does not guarantee detecting inaccurate ranging estimates, since LOS measurements can also yield large errors. As an example, the ranging root mean square error (RMSE) of the data labelled as LOS in a UWB based localization system database in the literature is of 0.714 m, significantly higher than the theoretical accuracy of a UWB system. Thus, a novel ML-based classification model is proposed to predict the magnitude of the ranging error. After applying the proposed classification model in the same data, the ranging RMSE of those ranging samples classified as most accurate is of only 0.183 m, significantly lower than the best RMSE we can obtain on the classical LOS/NLOS classification approach.