This dissertation was conducted as part of the efforts related to WPI's Precision Personnel Location (PPL) project, the purpose of which is to locate emergency personnel in hazardous indoor environments using radio location techniques. The current PPL system prototype uses a radio transmitter worn by the personnel, indoors, and receivers on reference units, outdoors. This dissertation proposes a new system architecture with bidirectional radio transmissions to replace the current unidirectional system architecture. This allows the development of a synchronization scheme that can extract additional Time of Arrival (TOA) information for estimating the location of personnel. This dissertation also describes an extension of the multi-signal fusion technique previously used that incorporates this TOA information. At the cost of a more complicated mobile unit design, resultant benefits of this approach include rejection of signal reflectors as solutions, improved accuracy with limited reference unit geometries, improved noise rejection and significant computation reduction. In this dissertation the mathematical underpinnings of this approach are presented, a performance analysis is developed and the results are evaluated in the context of experimental data.

Creator

• Amendolare, Vincent T.

Contributors

• Cyganski, David
• Heinricher, Arthur C.
• Duckworth, R. James

Degree

• PhD

Unit

• Electrical & Computer Engineering

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Language

• English

Identifier

• etd-040510-123325

Keyword

• indoor location
• synchronization
• Time of Arrival

Advisor

• Cyganski, David

Committee

• Heinricher, Arthur
• Duckworth, R. James

Defense date

• 2010-04-01

Year

• 2010

Date created

• 2010-04-05

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright