Over the past decade, spatial audio awareness evolved into an in-demand feature in audio entertainment. The addition of sound source locations to, for instance, movies or music adds a level of auditory envelopment and spatial awareness to the audio experience. Expensive setups present in, for instance, cinema's, are able to create this envelopment by means of a large set of loudspeakers with which the desired sound fields are created. Creating this spatial envelopment in practical consumer living rooms or home cinema setups proves to be a more challenging task due to the impractical amount of loudspeakers required. To create the audio envelopment with a small amount of loudspeakers, crosstalk cancellation can be used. Crosstalk cancellation as posed in literature is, however, not robust enough to be used in practical appliances. The main cause of these bad characteristics is the objective cost function it optimizes which results in an ill-posed problem. In this thesis, the crosstalk cancellation problem is relaxed by aiming for perceptually sufficient results instead of aiming for objectively optimal results. The human auditory system has its limitations in both the perception of audio and localization of audio sources. Exploiting the limitations of the auditory system generates mathematical freedom that can be used to construct a more robust and stable crosstalk cancellation algorithm. This thesis provides the first steps towards the incorporation of audio perception in the domain of crosstalk cancellation and audio envelopment with a limited amount of loudspeakers.

The work presented in this thesis investigates the creation of virtual sound sources in a room equipped with a limited number of loudspeakers. This limited number of loudspeakers is typical for consumer loudspeaker systems. Ideally, these systems can provide a listening experience in which localisation cues are completely present. However, in current systems, this is not the case. The limited number of loudspeakers make it impractical to produce a physically accurate sound field. A possible solution is to create a perceptually accurate sound field instead. In this work, a step towards an algorithm which can do so is presented. The developed algorithm requires knowledge of the listener placement, the room, and the loudspeaker placement. Spatial weighting is used to construct a region in which the acoustic en-ergy should be large and a region in which the acoustic energy should be limited. The loudspeaker playback signals are obtained by maximising the energy ratio between these regions, while at the same time ensuring that the perceptual difference between the received audio and reference audio remains limited. The algorithm employs a convex optimisation problem to facilitate efficiently solving for the playback signals. Concretely, six convex optimisation problems are proposed with somewhat increasing complexity and different weighting matrices. For each of the optimisation problems, the proposed algorithm is compared against a simple amplitude panning algorithm and a nearest neighbour algorithm. It is found that none of the considered algorithms is clearly preferred over the others in terms of the considered evaluation metrics. A major limitation of the presented work is that the evaluation metrics do not explicitly test for localisation accuracy. In future work, this should be investigated by including subjective tests.

The Constant Tone Extension (CTE) function introduced since Bluetooth Low Energy 5.1 greatly improves indoor Bluetooth Low Energy localization. These small, low-energy beacons transmit signals that Bluetooth-enabled devices can use to calculate proximity and positioning. This technology enables continuous navigation, location-based services, indoor wayfinding, and so on. The new feature, used together with an appropriate antenna array, can calculate the Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD). This study is solely concerned with AoA mode analysis.

Estimating AoA is challenging, especially indoors. Multipath signals, which greatly corrupt results in such a complex environment, cannot be ignored. The low-energy equipment used in BLE frequently results in a substantial frequency offset, which cannot be overlooked. Several elements are thoroughly examined in order to comprehend the positioning algorithm.

The processing of I/Q data is the first step in the prokect. Then we look at how frequency offset is created and how it affects estimation. We use maximum likelihood to calculate frequency offset after modeling the data structure. Following that, numerous AoA estimation and multipath-solving methods are discussed. We discuss the operation of a 4x4 URA and the advantages and disadvantages of having multiple antennas. A virtual antenna (VA) solution addresses hardware limitations, but it fails when it comes to multipath. Finally, we model AOA estimation and use the estimated angles to localize. The Matlab algorithm, as well as the LS and TLS methods, are introduced.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end indoor BLE positioning solution. The algorithm is tested using a Matlab simulation. The multipath scenario is created by simulating an empty room with raytracing and focusing on first-order reflection routes. The simulation demonstrates that Toeplitz Reconstruction (TR) works best with the appropriate settings. Over 90% of the results in a 4-by-4 uniform rectangular array (URA) have position errors of less than 0.14 meters. In about 60% of cases, increasing the size of the 8-by-8 Uniform Rectangular Array (URA) results in a position accuracy of less than 0.1 meters.

Following the simulation, a real-world experiment is conducted to assess the solutions' practicability and efficacy. To reduce uncontrolled multipath interference, the experiment was carried out outside. The TR method has a distance inaccuracy of 0.4 m, whereas conventional methods have a distance inaccuracy of 0.1-0.2 m. The most difficult challenge is estimating elevation angles, which necessitates additional research. The results of azimuth angle estimation studies match those of 1-D AoA estimation studies. Even with a high prediction error for elevation angle, the distance error is lower than in previous positioning research.

Finally, we make recommendations for future research. This could include optimizing algorithm parameters, taking antenna-related factors into account, changing CTE configurations, and so on.

A robot swarm of zebros (Dutch: ZEs Benige RObots) is being developed at the TU Delft, with the purpose of forming a large self-deploying sensor network that survey remote locations without the need for any pre-existing infrastructure, or be used for evaluating swarming algorithms in the field. Towards this goal, zebros need to be able to communicate with and localise nearby neighbours. Existing localisation solutions showed to be inadequate for the task, because they generally do not allow for localisation without existing infrastructure, do not allow scaling to a large swarm or because they rely on robot behaviour, which introduces a dependency of localisation on a specific swarming algorithm.
We present a fully-localised method of localisation called Tangolation, which estimates the location of a neighbour as a range and an angle, accompanied by a confidence value from 1 (low) to 5 (high). With Tangolation, two nodes estimate each other’s next location from a range measurement using Two-Way Ranging (TWR), and the exchange of the nodes’ displacement since the last range measurement. Therefore, the two nodes only need each other to determine each other’s location as long as at least one of the two is moving, allowing Tangolation to scale well to larger swarms. No knowledge about the network topology or control over robot behaviour is needed, and communication between localising nodes only needs to happen sparsely, at a frequency of once every five seconds per neighbour. A fully distributed Time Division Multiple Acces (TDMA) protocol named Anarchic TDMA (AN-TDMA) was devised to support communcation within the robot swarm, where nodes synchronise the slot start times without the need for a special coordinating node that indicates the start of slots or frames. AN-TDMA showed to increase the reachable channel utilisation ratios by 55% to 67% compared to the ALOHA method recommended by Decawave.

For TWR, the Decawave DW1000 transceiver was used, and the BNO055 IMU aided in displacement measuring. Tangolation was tested in a simulation with realistic conservative estimates of the noise over the range and displacement measurements. Even using conservative noise estimates, at least 95% of the estimated location angles are within the required 22◦ of the true value. Depending on the confidence level that Tangolation reports, 65% to 84% of the angle estimates are within 10◦ of the true value, which shows that Tangolation more than meets the set requirements.

The Orbiting Low Frequency Antennas for Radio Astronomy (OLFAR) project aims to develop a space-based low frequency radio telescope that will explore the universe's so-called dark ages, map the interstellar medium, and discover planetary and solar bursts in other solar systems. The telescope, composed of a swarm of at least fifty satellites working as a single instrument, will be sent to a location far from Earth in order to avoid the high Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) found at frequencies below 30 MHz, originating from Earth. The OLFAR telescope is a novel and complex system, requiring not-yet proven technologies and systems, therefore, a number of key technologies are still to be developed and proven. Most of these can be tested on Earth, but four aspects in particular require in-space verification. Those are (1) the satellite's propulsion and attitude control systems, and (2) their interactions with the large science antennas, as well as the (3) payload system itself and finally (4) the in-space interferometry and 3D-imaging. Furthermore, the RFI environment in the intended target orbits is mostly unknown. Indeed, only three satellites missions have previously been launched into orbit shedding light on the RFI environment, but sufficiently detailed measurements allowing for the creation of a usable RFI model have never been performed. To carry out both the hardware qualification and RFI measurements, a few pathfinder missions are deemed in order. This paper describes these pathfinders in detail; outlining the scientific objective, the technologies being demonstrated as well as the missions' roadmap which revolves around a novel systems engineering approach. This approach resembles those used in certain fast-paced industries where development is heavily parallelised and products are launched as soon as opportunities arise. This will be combined with in-space upgrading of mission firmware to allow for high flexibility within the limited time and budget constraints of these pathfinders. Copyright@en