Indoor positioning of vehicles using an active optical infrastructure

Indoor positioning is an enabling technology for advanced intra-logistic applications that employ tracking and tracing of goods and vehicles. For these applications, a positioning technology must offer a sufficient trade-off between accuracy, range, and costs. In this paper we present a novel positioning system based on optical technologies that is designed for tracing vehicles in a logistic environment. The major innovations of the system are an active optical infrastructure allowing absolute positioning without any other data source, and, on the receiver side, a hybrid data processing approach that combines signal and image processing. Using these optical technologies, a high accuracy can be achieved at lower costs compared to other approaches. The static positioning error is below 0.1 m. The active optical positioning approach joins signal and image processing technologies to a low-cost and high accuracy system. While designed for intra-logistic applications the technology can be adopted other fields such as building and shop-floor navigation.