Sensor Localization from Distance and Orientation Constraints

The sensor localization problem can be formalized using distance and orientation constraints, typically in 3D. Local methods can be used to refine an initial location estimation, but in many cases such estimation is not available and a method able to determine all the feasible solutions from scratch is necessary. Unfortunately, existing methods able to find all the solutions in distance space can not take into account orientations, or they can only deal with one- or two-dimensional problems and their extension to 3D is troublesome. This paper presents a method that addresses these issues. The proposed approach iteratively projects the problem to decrease its dimension, then reduces the ranges of the variable distances, and back-projects the result to the original dimension, to obtain a tighter approximation of the feasible sensor locations. This paper extends previous works introducing accurate range reduction procedures which effectively integrate the orientation constraints. The mutual localization of a fleet of robots carrying sensors and the position analysis of a sensor moved by a parallel manipulator are used to validate the approach.