Research Article
A Clustering-Based Approach for Improving the Accuracy of
UWB Sensor-Based Indoor Positioning System
Taner Arsan and Mohammed Muwafaq Noori Hameez
Computer Engineering Department, Kadir Has University, Istanbul 34083, Turkey
Correspondence should be addressed to Taner Arsan; arsan@khas.edu.tr
Received 6 July 2019; Revised 20 August 2019; Accepted 3 September 2019; Published 26 September 2019
Academic Editor: Jinglan Zhang
Copyright © 2019 Taner Arsan and Mohammed Muwafaq Noori Hameez. is is an open access article distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
ere 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 pen-
etration. is 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. is 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. is 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 al-
gorithm with the Kalman filter in which the Kalman-filtered UWB-measured test points are used as an input for the
proposed system.
1. Introduction
With the expansion of information technology, indoor
positioning technology has developed rapidly. Positioning
methods are mainly divided into two categories: the lo-
cation fingerprint positioning method and the trilateration
algorithm [1]. e need for high-accuracy indoor posi-
tioning is a very important issue. Determining the location
of patients in the hospital, locating workers in a large office,
and also people trapped in a burning building are all part of
scenarios that require a high accuracy indoor positioning
systems. Numerous solutions are presented for location
estimation of indoor targets [2, 3]. A large number of these
solutions rely on multilateration and triangulation
methods by utilizing ultrasound, infrared, and radio sig-
nals. ese solutions manage to provide information re-
lated to the location. Triangulation utilizes the properties of
triangles to determine the target position. It includes two
derivations: first, the lateration, and second, the angulation.
e lateration derivations determine the location of the
target by measuring the distances of this target from a
number of reference points, instead of directly measuring
the distance. e time difference of arrival (TDoA), the
time of arrival (ToA), or received signal strengths (RSS) are
usually measured; and the distance is obtained by calcu-
lating the attenuation of the transmitted signal strength or,
in another case, by multiplying the travel time and the
velocity of the radio signal. e round trip time of flight
(RToF) method is also used for range estimation purposes
in some systems. However, angulation helps us to locate a
target by calculating the angles relative to the reference
points in the angle of arrival (AoA) method [4, 5]. Many
positioning systems have different architectures, configu-
rations, accuracies, and reliabilities to determine the po-
sition of objects or people. Some of the indoor positioning
systems are GPS, infrared, Wi-Fi, RFID, BLE Beacon, ul-
trasonic location-based systems, and UWB [6, 7]. UWB
signals have an extremely large bandwidth, more than
500 MHz. UWB transmitters allow better power efficiency
due to its low consumption of power, compared to other
Hindawi
Mobile Information Systems
Volume 2019, Article ID 6372073, 13 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/6372073