Ultra Wideband for Shipyard 5.0 Indoor Gantry Crane High-Precision Positioning

Abstract

[Abstract] The shipyard of the future, called Shipyard 5.0, is a highly technological environment where real-time monitoring of products, by-products and transport vehicles is crucial. Among the technologies able to locate such elements indoors, Ultra Wideband (UWB) is a good option for providing accurate positioning. However, the use of UWB in shipyards faces challenges due to interference from metallic objects, which impacts its accuracy. To validate the use of UWB in a shipyard, this paper presents tests that were carried out in workshops that Navantia owns in Ferrol’s estuary, where UWB tags were placed on a gantry crane hook. The presented results show the performance of the system when locating the hook in 3D and the impact of attaching multiple tags to the hook to harness signal diversity. Specifically, a relatively lowerror is obtained when estimating only the height of the gantry crane hook (approximately 1 m), while the threedimensional positioning error reached an error of between 2 and 3m for the z-axis