This project uses sound and light to perform low-cost indoor 3D localization. See summary video below for the overview.

While the idea was to use infrared light and ultrasonic sound so that the system wouldn't be detectable to humans, ultrasonic transducers are much more difficult to find than those for audible sound. Therefore, the system was built using audible sound. The update rate in the video above is relatively slow, only because the noise is too annoying. Otherwise, this could easily be run at much higher update rates.

While it worked pretty well for short ranges, especially for linear distance measurement, there are some major limitations and challenges not dealt with here:

• Multi-path issues for the light and sound are not examined
  • Currently the system uses an analog filter for both signals and merely looks for a power level, but with better signal processing (likely possibly via FPGA), each signal could be coded and reflections ignored.
• The sound filter amplification had to be tuned manually to achieve a reliable trigger without false positives
  • The amplification could be adjustable by the system so it could sweep until a signal was received, then adjust in real time based on measured distance
  • The signal could be processed through a bandpass filter with a more aggressive roll-off, and very high amplification used all the time. This may cause issues with noise, of course, but ideally only the signal we care about would be passed.
  • Using ultrasonic sound may help this, including choosing a frequency that doesn't occur much, since the ~5kHz sound used here may also be coming from other sources in the world.
• The calculation of position was performed assuming perfect linear measurements
  • Ideally, more than 3 base stations would be used, so the calculations would not have a unique result. If those signals were combined with IMU data in a Kalman filter, the results would be higher quality and orientation could also be calculated.