Following a person movement in a hallway

Projects General Guidance
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I would like to improve an existing project, but I am not sure how to approach it.

I have a hallway with dimensions 1.2m (4ft) by 5.5m (18ft). At the moment I have placed PIR sensors at the two ends of the hallway (on the longer side) and when a person moves from one end, I animate a WS2812 strip to "simulate" the movement from the end the person was detected to the other end. Then after a timeout of no movement detected, I fadeout the strip in the opposite direction.

The improvement I would like to do it to make the LEDs "follow" the person the whole time. I do not need millimetre accuracy, something around 30cm (1ft) of accuracy is enough for me. I have considered the following ideas, but I am not sure which one is simpler or more reliable:

  1. Adding more PIR sensors along the wall and covering the "eye" cap so that it sees a very small area. But this would mean I might need something like 15-20 of them, which seems a lot
  2. Using Time-of-Flight sensors like TOF400C-VL53L1X - since they are limited to 4m, I could either use some more advanced sensor or just place two of them on the opposite smaller walls and face them to the hallway length.
    • Not absolutely required, but using something like VL53L5CX (or VL53L1CB) that supports multiple zones or multiple targets might be able to help me to detect when there are more people in the hallway? Also using two sensors at two ends would help in case one person is behind the other and one sensor will detect one of the people, while the other sensor detects the other person.
  3. Ultrasonic sensors, but I believe this would also require a big array of them?

Preferably I would like to use an Arduino Nano with RP2040.

2

LIDAR on one end of the hallway.

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Draw a diagram of what you have now versus what you want.
You can waffle on for days and not get the plan across.

1 Like
4

Ultrasound sensors can basically be used in the same way you use those ToF sensors - one on either end of the corridor.

For more detailed location you could have an array of sensors, every 50 cm or so meaning a total of 10 sensors.

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