Using Ultrawideband Technology to Control a Car to Reach Its Destination

The paper presents an indoor positioning system that uses ultra-wideband technology. For this purpose, we used four anchors and one tag that is fixed on one small car. The anchors and the tag are DWM1001 modules. The configuration of the five DW1001 modules is performed through a smartphone application provided by the manufacturer. The car has been built by us. The controller of the car is a Raspberry Pi microcomputer which controls the driver of the car DC motors by generating PWM signals. In addition, Raspberry Pi communicates with the tag by UART interface. The Raspberry Pi is powered by two 3.7 V rechargeable batteries that are connected in series, followed by a DC-DC converter that generates a 5 V DC voltage. Thus, our goal is to control the car to reach a certain destination (xd,yd) requested by the user via Wi-Fi. Because the car hosts the tag, it continuously updates its (x,y) coordinates according to the four anchors. We implemented two scenarios, considering the initial (x,y) coordinates of the car. In the first scenario, either xd=x or yd=y, so the car will move to destination either along the y-axis or along the x-axis. In the second scenario, xd is different to x and yd is different to y, so the car moves along one of the axes and then turns 90 degrees to reach its destination. Experimental results that show the precision of positioning system are presented.