UWBike: Global Bicycle Positioning System Using a Single Ultra-Wideband Reference Point

Cooperative collision avoidance systems promise collision prevention by exchanging movement information between road users to alert them of imminent collisions. Precise global bicycle positioning is one key requirement in these systems. Existing technologies, such as GNSS, fall short of consistently delivering the required positioning accuracy in the real world. Therefore, this paper presents UWBike, a novel ubiquitous precise bicycle positioning system based on smartphone sensors that allows accurate and low-cost global positioning and position tracking. UWBike uses the smartphone's camera in combination with visual-inertial odometry (VIO) for relative position tracking. We show that UWBike is a feasible solution for short-term dead reckoning, suitable for the dynamic motion of bicycles, achieving an error rate of 1.3 cm/m in real-world experiments. To achieve a global position, we introduce a novel algorithm to convert the local coordinate system, derived from relative position tracking, into a global reference frame, taking advantage of a single ultra-wideband reference point. Our results demonstrate high accuracy, with a mean position error of only 36 cm, validating the real-life feasibility of our system for cooperative collision avoidance systems.