Self-Organizing Neighbor Discovery and Ranging for Battery-Powered Ultra-Wideband Anchors

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has emerged as a popular solution in support of autonomous navigation. Unfortunately, installing a localization system is still a significant challenge in many large-scale or secluded environments. Since most available solutions require anchors to be connected to the power grid, infrastructures turn up to be extremely expensive when not simply unfeasible. We address these issues with SONAR, an UWB localization system based on battery-powered anchors. SONAR supports multi-year deployments without wired backbones, covering a wide spectrum of scenarios: from planetary exploration, our motivating application, to more earthly uses in, e.g., agricultural fields, smart warehouses, or smart health. The proposed system can be easily tuned to satisfy different needs in terms of ranging rate and energy consumption. We evaluate SONAR in a multi-hop testbed, showing that multiple roaming users can quickly discover each other and the surrounding anchors, and self-organize in a contention-free ranging schedule.