Multiple-Vehicle Localization Using Maximum Likelihood Kalman Filtering and Ultra-Wideband Signals

In this article we study the problem of localizing a fleet of vehicles in an indoor environment using ultra-wideband (UWB) signals. This is typically done by placing a number of UWB anchors with respect to which vehicles measure their distances. The localization performance is usually poor in the vertical axis, due to the fact that anchors are often placed at similar heights. To improve accuracy, we study the use of inter-vehicle distance measurements. These measurements introduce a technical challenge, as this requires the joint estimation of positions of all vehicles, and currently available methods become numerically complex. To go around this, we use a recently proposed technique called maximum likelihood Kalman filtering (MLKF). We present experiments using real data, showing how the addition of inter-vehicle measurements improves the localization accuracy by about 60%. Experiments also show that the MLKF achieves a localization error similar to the best among available methods, while requiring only about 20% of computational time.