The UWB-based positioning algorithm and H/W development for safety of offshore plant workers

An offshore plant industry environment has high risk of accidents, accurate position information is important for workers safety. In this paper, UWB-based triangulation algorithm and hardware are proposed for offshore plant. The distance between the tag and the AP is measured by the TWR-ToA method, and accurate results are calculated by triangulation with three or more distance values. The proposed system consisting of tag, AP and positioning engine provides positioning results in x, y coordinates format with response time under 1 second.

I. Introduction

The nature of the offshore plant environment can lead to major accidents such as overturning, fire, sinking, etc., resulting in large damage, when failure to respond appropriately to initial response in the event of an accident. Position information of offshore plant worker is important for quick and accurate initial response to minimize damage [1]. However, since the offshore plant environment is complicated inside and various steel structures such as industrial equipment are arranged, the communication environment of the wireless signal does not guarantee receive performance.