I’m currently completing a design honours project and was looking at utilising UWB sensors for live location tracking. I have a few questions that I would love to hear your opinions on, as you may have more experience.
For a runner on a 400 m track, what positioning accuracy should I realistically expect from your UWB modules outdoors while the tag is moving, and is that good enough to keep someone on an invisible guide path rather than just in a broad zone (like a 1m wide channel)?
If I wanted to prototype this on an athletics track, how many anchors/base stations would you actually recommend, where would you place them, and what spacing/layout would give the most stable tracking around curves as well as straights?
What is the simplest prototype you’d recommend for a student project: UWB for live position plus headphones controlled by a phone/microcontroller, and what parts of that workflow are likely to be hardest for a beginner?
Do you think UWB is the right technology for this, or would you use something else for an athletics track?
@Max317894 I think UWB is a sensible choice for a prototype, but I’d calibrate expectations a bit for a full 400 m track.
The short version: modules like the BU-03 UWB positioning kit quote about 10 cm accuracy and up to 25 m line-of-sight, but that’s under fairly ideal conditions. For a moving runner outdoors, once you add all of the possible sources of error, I’d expect something more like “good enough for lane-level guidance if the setup is dense and well-tuned”, not “centimetre perfect all the way around the oval”. A 1 m wide invisible corridor is plausible for a demo, but I wouldn’t treat it as guaranteed everywhere on the track.
For layout, the big limitation is range. A 400 m track is much larger than a typical small-room UWB demo, so I wouldn’t try to cover the whole oval with 3-4 anchors. I’d start with one section of track first — say a straight or one bend plus straight — and use 4 anchors minimum, preferably mounted high, with clear line-of-sight and not all in one line. If you later scale to the full oval, you’d most likely need many anchors distributed around the perimeter so the tag always has 3+ good references nearby. Curves are where geometry gets awkward, so anchors near the bend entry/exit usually matter more than evenly spacing everything by distance alone.
I’m not certain where the headphones come into this project, would it be possible to describe your end goal in more detail?
For example, is this a guidance problem? For instance, keeping a visually impaired runner in their lane? Or feedback on the pace of a runner throughout the race?
Another option for positioning outdoors is RTK. A module like this will cost a similar amount to a full UWB system and ought to provide more accuracy and less trouble when integrating systems.
I think 400 meter is a little too much for this specific board. Like Liam said you will likely only get 25-meters of range, maybe pushing it to 30-35 and it will get real spotty.
You could definitely have multiple base stations around, but you would likely need more than the 8 that these boards easily support. I have dived into getting more than 8 going at once, but I haven’t had any luck yet. Also, the complexity of handling all these base station locations and math becomes very difficult, very quickly - but not impossible.
But to answer some questions:
If you could get it to work across the whole track, it would be give or take 5-10cm of accuracy.
You would need 2-3 anchors in range at all times, given a standard 400m track is up to 180m wide, I think you would need 20-ish to do this, but again the complexity of code and math becomes quite a bit.
I would have a microcontroller on the person reading the one set up as the tag. The math of tracking is the hardest, but we have some good examples in the guide.
I would probably opt for something GPS based here. Regular GPS modules can get an accuracy of about 1 meter if you are outdoors and have open sky above you (hopefully this is your case with your track). Systems like RTK are definitely worth checking out as they can do a bit more fancy processing and get that accuracy down to a 1-2 cm accuracy. It is a rabbit hole to go down, but if might be a good option with UWB’s range.
