Nonlinear Estimation Techniques for Positioning Using Multilateration

Aaron S. Brown, David F. Hardiman and Danny Cartner

Abstract:	Unmanned systems are useful for numerous military and commercial applications, most of which require the system to determine its location on the earth. This is typically accomplished by using the Global Positioning System (GPS), but there are situations where GPS can be degraded either by the environment or by jamming. Current research is focusing on a method to potentially serve as a complement to GPS to help unmanned systems determine their position in these degraded environments. This paper describes a method that utilizes a mobile adhoc network of nodes, each of which are capable of obtaining ranges to surrounding nodes. These ranges, along with the positions of some nodes that know their position either by using GPS or another geolocation method, are then used by multilateration techniques to determine the location of the other nodes in the network. This network is a mobile ad-hoc network in that all nodes may act as either ranging nodes or receivers, and no nodes are required to be in a fixed position. There are various suboptimal nonlinear estimation methods for combining range and position data that could be used in this type approach. The traditional Extended Kalman Filter, the Unscented Kalman Filter, and the Particle Filter are considered in this paper. The Particle Filter analysis in this paper is from a strictly theoretical standpoint. The level of research completed to this point does not allow a final conclusion as to which of the filtering methods is best for this application. However, a description of the different methods is provided along with a summary of simulation results that have been achieved thus far.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2005) September 13 - 16, 2005 Long Beach Convention Center Long Beach, CA
Pages:	553 - 559
Cite this article:	Brown, Aaron S., Hardiman, David F., Cartner, Danny, "Nonlinear Estimation Techniques for Positioning Using Multilateration," Proceedings of the 18th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2005), Long Beach, CA, September 2005, pp. 553-559.
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