Harmonia. Cheap, accurate indoor localization with RF.

Ultra-wideband has been shown to achieve order-cm RF-localization accuracy, yet it is prohibitively expensive to implement in practice.

Harmonia seeks the best of both worlds, leveraging affordable, low-energy narrowband frontends with a novel mixing scheme to generate ultra-wideband (UWB) signals. These signals are captured using a tunable narrowband receiver that sweeps the spectrum, stitching together a complete UWB picture.

Harmonia is designed as an assymetric tag and anchor system. Lightweight, low-cost, low-energy, low-complexity tags are distributed in free space. These tags mix the output of a narrowband radio with a square wave to generate a UWB signal. Anchor nodes with a highly tunable narrowband frontend quickly sweep the spectrum and stitch together samples to form one, unified UWB capture.

Our Harmonia prototype captures 56 location samples/second, enabling location tracking with both high temporal fidelity and high resolution in 3D space.