Efficient Positioning Method for Underground Pipe Gallery Inspection Based on UWB Adaptive Fusion

ABSTRACT To address the challenges of slow positioning speed and inaccurate localisation of underground pipeline corridors in complex environments using ultra‐wideband (UWB) absolute positioning, this paper proposes a Hybrid UWB‐IMU Adaptive Localisation Algorithm (HUIALA) for precise underground pipeline corridor positioning. The positioning method uses UWB as absolute positioning, IMU and odometer trajectory calculation as relative positioning (predictive positioning), and updates the observation noise by calculating the fuzzy distance to the triangle centroid to adaptively allocate weights. At the same time, dynamically adjust the intervention and exit of predicted positioning based on system operation, and filter out interference such as UWB positioning drift and absolute positioning failure. The proposed method is based on the simulation and experiment of a wheeled inspection vehicle system using UWB and inertial navigation. The experimental result shows that the proposed method maintains better response speed and high positioning accuracy during dynamic testing in simulated interference environments. The positioning speed is improved by 98.9% compared to single UWB positioning, and the positioning accuracy is improved by about 45.84% and 27.96% compared to single UWB positioning and KF fusion positioning, respectively.