Multichannel UWB Scheduling for Localization of Multiple Mobile Robots

Abstract

This study proposes a multichannel ultrawideband (UWB) scheduling method to facilitate the localization of multiple mobile robots. In conventional single-channel UWB systems, ranging exchanges for multiple tags must be scheduled sequentially to avoid message collisions; however, this action increases the localization cycle time as a function of the number of robots. To reduce the localization cycle time, the proposed method assigns a fixed UWB channel to each anchor and allows each tag to switch channels sequentially for ranging using multiple anchors. In addition, an index-based response delay is applied to each tag in to prevent response collisions of multiple tags within the same channel. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a higher localization update rate (~3.48 times) than that achieved by the single-channel method. At a robot speed of 0.8 m/s, the mean position error was reduced from 0.201 m to 0.152 m. These findings suggest that multichannel UWB scheduling enables timely and accurate multi-robot localization, supporting responsive control and coordination in warehouse logistics and industrial automation.