Publications / 2020 Proceedings of the 37th ISARC, Kitakyushu, Japan

Automated Data Acquisition for Indoor Localization and Tracking of Materials Onsite

Hassan Bardareh and Osama Moselhi
Pages 765-772 (2020 Proceedings of the 37th ISARC, Kitakyushu, Japan, ISBN 978-952-94-3634-7, ISSN 2413-5844)
Abstract:

Considerable body of literature exits on automated site data acquisition for tracking and progress reporting of construction operations. While GPS-based solutions have been widely investigated in many studies for outdoor tracking of these operations, indoor tracking proved to be more challenging. This paper focuses on indoor material localization and investigates the use of two remote sensing (RS) technologies including ultra-wideband (UWB) and radio frequency identification device (RFID) in order to support automated tracking of indoor operations. The integrated use of these two technologies is proposed to benefit from the capabilities of each technology and to have a cost-effective and practical solution for location identification of the materials on site. The proposed methodology includes two steps. First, tracking of the items located above floor level such as plumbing and HVAC installations. This was performed using accurate identification and 3D-location information generated by an UWB system. A set of experiments were carried out using various filters to improve the localization information. The results indicate that an increase in range distance between UWB tags and receivers increases the mean ranging error from around 20 centimeters to over 50 centimeters. In the second step, an UWB tag is attached to a hand-held RFID reader and accordingly the accurate location of that reader is stored. Then, by using algorithms such as boundary condition trilateration (BConTri) and received signal strength (RSS), the objects that are labelled by RFID tags are localized. Accordingly, this integrated configuration of the sensors eliminates the need for using a large number of RFID reference tags onsite for indoor material localization. The data fusion embedded in the proposed configuration is expected to enhance automated progress reporting. Besides, it is likely to enable identification and measurement of deviations from as-planned models in a timely manner. The experimental data captured in the lab will be analyzed and presented, highlighting the advantages of the proposed method.

Keywords: Automated progress tracking; RFID system; UWB system; Data fusion