A Clustering-Based Approach for Improving the Accuracy of UWB Sensor-Based Indoor Positioning System

There are several methods which can be used to locate an object or people in an indoor location. Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a specifically promising indoor positioning technology because of its high accuracy, resistance to interference, and better penetration. This study aims to improve the accuracy of the UWB sensor-based indoor positioning system. To achieve that, the proposed system is trained by using the K-means algorithm with an additional average silhouette method. This helps us to define the optimal number of clusters to be used by the K-means algorithm based on the value of the silhouette coefficient. Fuzzy c-means and mean shift algorithms are added for comparison purposes. This paper also introduces the impact of the Kalman filter while using the measured UWB test points as an input for the Kalman filter in order to obtain a better estimation of the position. As a result, the average localization error is reduced by 43.26% (from 16.3442 cm to 9.2745 cm) when combining the K-means algorithm with the Kalman filter in which the Kalman-filtered UWB-measured test points are used as an input for the proposed system.