Wireless 3D Localization Concept for Industrial Automation Based on a Bearings Only Extended Kalman Filter

Modern factories and the fourth industrial revolution demand for solutions to monitor the working area and to support the assembly process. One of the key tasks in this context is the localization and tracking of autonomous robots and vehicles as well as hand driven tools. Promising candidates for flexible, wireless solutions are microwave localization systems, like the 24 GHz frequency modulated continuous wave radar used in this paper. In order to reduce the synchronization effort for the employed secondary radar system, only angle-of-arrival measurements are evaluated for the estimation of 3D position and velocity. Therefore, a novel Extended Kalman Filter is presented in this paper to determine the transponder location solely from bearing measurements and to reduce the influence of measurement outliers. For verification, experimental results from a close-range indoor localization scenario are provided and evaluated with the high-precision reference by a robotic arm.