L-SMNR

A flexible, scalable, and accurate localization scheme for multi-robot systems

Abstract

L-SMNR is designed to provide flexible, scalable, and accurate location-awareness for multi-robot systems. This method designs a new localization sensor featuring UWB arrays, enabling pairwise relative localization without relying on external infrastructures. Beyond hardware design, L-SMNR optimizes the wireless protocol to ensure scalability and timeliness for accommodating larger swarm sizes, and proposes advanced signal processing methods to acquire high-accuracy position estimations from received signals. Our scheme is poised to serve as the foundational infrastructure for multi-robot systems, equipping them with reliable position-awareness to navigate safely, accomplish complex tasks, and revolutionize traditional practices in diverse domains.

Highlights

  • Devise a signal-multiplexing network ranging scheme for positioning and clock synchronization, which incorporates a novel measuring protocol to maximize the measuring update rates and maximum-likelihood range estimations to mitigate the coupling effects of clock errors and node mobility.

  • Propose novel calibration methods to correct ranging and bearing errors, which are adaptable to different estimation methods, and require minimal manual calibration.

  • Develop a relative localization algorithm that leverages intra- and inter-node cooperation with coordinate reference alignment to reconstruct the geometric relationships among the nodes.

Papers

  1. “L-SMNR: A flexible, scalable, and accurate localization scheme for multi-agent systems” (in preparation)

  2. Z. Zhang\(^\dagger\), H. Zhao\(^\dagger\), J. Wang, and Y. Shen, “Signal-multiplexing ranging for network localization,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 1694–1709, Mar. 2022. (\(^\dagger\) equal contribution)

  3. H. Zhao, Z. Zhang, Z. Zhang, and Y. Shen, “A signal-multiplexing ranging scheme for integrated localization and sensing,” IEEE Wireless Commun. Lett., vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 1609-1613, Aug. 2022.

  4. Z. Zhang, H. Zhao, and Y. Shen, “High-efficient ranging algorithms for wireless sensor network,” in Proc. Int. Conf. on Wireless Commun. and Signal Process., Xi’an, China, Oct. 2019, pp. 1–6.