Radar and sonar provide information of both range and radial velocity to unknown objects. This is accomplished by emitting a signal waveform and computing the round trip time and Doppler shift. Estimation of the round trip time and Doppler shift is usually done separately without considering the couplings between these two object related quantities. The purpose of this contribution is to first model the amplitude, time shift and time scale of the returned signal in terms of the object related states range and velocity, and analyse the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the joint range and velocity estimation problem. One of the conclusions is that there is negative correlation between range and velocity. The maximum likelihood (ML) cost function also confirms this strong negative correlation. For target tracking applications, the use of the correct covariance matrix for the measurement vector gives a significant gain in information, compared to using the variance of range and velocity assuming independence. In other words, the knowledge of the correlation tells the tracking filter that a too large range measurement comes most likely with a too small velocity measurement, and vice versa. Experiments with sound pulses reflected in a wall indoors confirm the main conclusion of negative correlation.

This paper presents a method for global pose estimation using inertial sensors, monocular vision, and ultra wide band (UWB) sensors. It is demonstrated that the complementary characteristics of these sensors can be exploited to provide improved global pose estimates, without requiring the introduction of any visible infrastructure, such as fiducial markers. Instead, natural landmarks are jointly estimated with the pose of the platform using a simultaneous localization and mapping framework, supported by a small number of easy-to-hide UWB beacons with known positions. The method is evaluated with data from a controlled indoor experiment with high precision ground truth. The results show the benefit of the suggested sensor combination and suggest directions for further work.

We consider an indoor tracking system consisting of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a camera that detects markers in the environment. There are many camera based tracking systems described in literature and available commercially, and a few of them also has support from IMU. These are based on the best-effort principle, where the performance varies depending on the situation. In contrast to this, we start with a specification of the system performance, and the design isbased on an information theoretic approach, where specific user scenarios are defined. Precise models for the camera and IMU are derived for a fusion filter, and the theoretical Cramér-Rao lower bound and the Kalman filter performance are evaluated. In this study, we focus on examining the camera quality versus the marker density needed to get at least a one mm and one degree accuracy in tracking performance.