Cooperative Relative Positioning of Mobile Users by Fusing IMU Inertial and UWB Ranging Information

Relative positioning between multiple mobile users is essential for many applications, such as search and rescue in disaster areas or human social interaction. Inertial-measurement unit (IMU) is promising to determine the change of position over short periods of time, but it is very sensitive to error accumulation over long term run. By equipping the mobile users with ranging unit, e.g. ultra-wideband (UWB), it is possible to achieve accurate relative positioning by trilateration-based approaches. As compared to vision or laser-based sensors, the UWB does not need to be with in line-of-sight and provides accurate distance estimation. However, UWB does not provide any bearing information and the communication range is limited, thus UWB alone cannot determine the user location without any ambiguity. In this paper, we propose an approach to combine IMU inertial and UWB ranging measurement for relative positioning between multiple mobile users without the knowledge of the infrastructure. We incorporate the UWB and the IMU measurement into a probabilistic-based framework, which allows to cooperatively position a group of mobile users and recover from positioning failures. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the benefits of incorporating IMU inertial and UWB ranging measurements.Comment: accepted by ICRA 201

Real-Time Urban Weather Observations for Urban Air Mobility

Cities of the future will have to overcome congestion, air pollution and increasing infrastructure cost while moving more people and goods smoothly, efficiently and in an eco-friendly manner. Urban air mobility (UAM) is expected to be an integral component of achieving this new type of city. This is a new environment for sustained aviation operations. The heterogeneity of the urban fabric and the roughness elements within it create a unique environment where flight conditions can change frequently across very short distances. UAM vehicles with their lower mass, more limited thrust and slower speeds are especially sensitive to these conditions. Since traditional aviation weather products for observations and forecasts at an airport on the outskirts of a metropolitan area do not translate well to the urban environment, weather data for low-altitude urban airspace is needed and will be particularly critical for unlocking the full potential of UAM. To help address this need, crowdsourced weather data from sources prevalent in urban areas offer the opportunity to create dense meteorological observation networks in support of UAM. This paper considers a variety of potential observational sources and proposes a cyber-physical system architecture, including an incentive-based crowdsensing application, which empowers UAM weather forecasting and operations

Collective Intelligence and the Mapping of Accessible Ways in the City: a Systematic Literature Review

This paper has the objective of assessing how ICTs are being used to provide accessibility in urban mobility, with special interest to collective intelligence approaches. A systematic literature review (SLR) was performed, using several different criteria to filter down the 500+ academic papers that were originally obtained from a search for “accessible maps” to the 43 papers that finally remained in the corpus of the SLR. Among the findings, it was noticed that (i) few studies explored the motivations of users that actively contribute, providing information to feed maps, and they restricted themselves to exploring three techniques: gaming, monetary reward and ranking; (ii) social networks are rarely used as a source of data for building and updating maps; and (iii) the literature does not discuss any initiative that aims to support the needs of physically and visually impaired citizens at the same time