Ultra Wideband Ranging and Link Budget Design for Naval Crane Applications

In this thesis a UWB-based ranging scheme is designed, simulated, implemented and tested. This system was designed to address the problem of safely unloading cargo crates to ships in the open seas. UWB antennas are placed on the four corners of the cargo crate, providing the information needed to a ranging/positioning algorithm that estimates the orientation and distance of the ship's deck from the crate. Furthermore, the system is successfully tested in a 1/24 scale demonstration. In addition to the UWB ranging application, this thesis evaluates an already proposed modification to the traditional narrowband link budget based on the Friis transmission formula. The proposed modification replaces frequency-domain parameters with time-domain values to handle the wide bandwidth of UWB systems. The proposed approach is shown via measurements to be much more accurate than the traditional technique.