DoA-Based Rigid Body Localization Adopting Single Base Station

Abstract

Simultaneously determining the 3-dimensional (3-D) position and orientation of a rigid object is termed rigid body localization (RBL). The RBL has potential applications in the systems of virtual reality, spacecraft docking, and so on. In this letter, a new RBL scheme based on Direction of Arrival (DoA) measurements is proposed, which needs only a single base station (BS) and has no requirement for time synchronization between the target of interest and BS. For determining the position and orientation, the rigid object of interest has wireless sensors mounted on its surface, which are distributed with known topology. We first build a geometrical model fusing the measured DoAs from the wireless sensors and their known topology to determine the 3-D coordinates of these sensors. Then, using the obtained coordinate information, we achieve the RBL via rigid body transform methodologies. The constrained Cramer–Rao bound is derived to evaluate the performance of the developed method with respect to the DoA noise level and rigid body size.