A Drone Based Firefighter Supporting Navigation System Using IR-UWB and Inertial Sensor

This paper presents a relative positioning system between firefighters and a drone. The drone can serve a supporting function to a firefighter, because it already equips a various sensors and RF communication system. In case of working environment of a firefighter, pre-installed infrastructure is useless because of a fire. So, the proposed relative positioning system self-contained positioning system such as a Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning (PDR) and DeadReckoning (DR) for a firefighter and a drone, respectively. Also, a IR-UWB based range measurement compensate a drift error of PDR and DR on a relative positioning system. We modeled a relative positioning system based on a Kalman Filter for a robustness of a proposed system. In order to verify the proposed system, we performed experiments on 2 subjects and a drone in indoor. Also, we demonstrated its improved accuracy on relative positioning between firefighters and a drone.