The emerging Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) including the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) offer more visible satellites for positioning users. To employ those new satellites in a real-time kinematic (RTK) algorithm to enhance positioning precision and availability, a data processing model for the dual constellation of GPS and BDS is proposed and analyzed. A Kalman filter-based algorithm is developed to estimate the float ambiguities for short baseline scenarios. The entire work process of the high-precision algorithm based on the proposed model is deeply investigated in detail. The model is validated with real GPS and BDS data recorded from one zero and two short baseline experiments. Results show that the proposed algorithm can generate fixed baseline output with the same precision level as that of either a single GPS or BDS RTK algorithm. The significantly improved fixed rate and time to first fix of the proposed method demonstrates a better availability and effectiveness on processing multi-GNSSs.

In this article, we design a new time-of-arrival (TOA) system for simultaneous user device (UD) localization and synchronization with a periodic asymmetric ranging network, namely, PARN. The PARN includes one primary anchor node (PAN) transmitting and receiving signals, and many secondary ANs (SANs) only receiving signals. All the UDs can transmit and receive signals. The PAN periodically transmits sync signal and the UD transmits response signal after reception of the sync signal. Using TOA measurements from the periodic sync signal at SANs, we develop a Kalman filtering method to virtually synchronize anchor nodes (ANs) with high accuracy estimation of clock parameters. Employing the virtual synchronization, and TOA measurements from the response signal and sync signal, we then develop a maximum-likelihood (ML) approach, namely, ML-LAS, to simultaneously localize and synchronize a moving UD. We analyze the UD localization and synchronization error, and derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). Different from existing asymmetric ranging network-based TOA systems, the new PARN 1) uses the periodic sync signals at the SAN to exploit the temporal correlated clock information for high accuracy virtual synchronization and 2) compensates the UD movement and clock drift using various TOA measurements to achieve consistent and simultaneous localization and synchronization performance. Numerical results verify the theoretical analysis that the new system has high accuracy in AN clock offset estimation and simultaneous localization and synchronization for a moving UD. We implement a prototype hardware system and demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the PARN in real-world applications by experiments.

In two-way time-of-arrival (TOA) systems, a user device (UD) obtains its position and timing information by round-trip communications to a number of anchor nodes (ANs) at known locations. Compared with the one-way TOA technique, the two-way TOA scheme is easy to implement and has higher localization and synchronization accuracy. Existing two-way TOA methods assume a stationary UD. This will cause uncompensated position and timing errors. In this article, we propose an optimal maximum likelihood (ML) based two-way TOA localization and synchronization method, namely TWLAS. Different from the existing methods, it takes the UD mobility into account to compensate the error caused by the UD motion. We analyze its estimation error and derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). We show that the conventional two-way TOA method is a special case of the TWLAS when the UD is stationary, and the TWLAS has high estimation accuracy than the conventional one-way TOA method. We also derive the estimation error in the case of deviated UD velocity information. Numerical result demonstrates that the estimation accuracy of the new TWLAS for a moving UD reaches CRLB, better than that of the conventional one-way TOA method, and the estimation error caused by the deviated UD velocity information is consistent with the theoretical analysis.

Localizing moving targets in unknown harsh environments has always been a severe challenge. This letter investigates a novel localization system based on multi-agent networks, where multiple agents serve as mobile anchors broadcasting their time-space information to the targets. We study how the moving target can localize itself using the sequential time of arrival (TOA) of the one-way broadcast signals. An extended two-step weighted least squares (TSWLS) method is proposed to jointly estimate the position and velocity of the target in the presence of agent information uncertainties. We also address the large target clock offset (LTCO) problem for numerical stability. Analytical results reveal that our method reaches the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) under small noises. Numerical results show that the proposed method performs better than the existing algorithms.

The spatiotemporal information plays crucial roles in a multi-agent system (MAS). However, for a highly dynamic and dense MAS in unknown environments, estimating its spatiotemporal states is a difficult problem. In this paper, we present BLAS: a wireless broadcast relative localization and clock synchronization system to address these challenges. Our BLAS system exploits a broadcast architecture, under which a MAS is categorized into parent agents that broadcast wireless packets and child agents that are passive receivers, to reduce the number of required packets among agents for relative localization and clock synchronization. We first propose an asynchronous broadcasting and passively receiving (ABPR) protocol. The protocol schedules the broadcast of parent agents using a distributed time division multiple access (D-TDMA) scheme and delivers interagent information used for joint relative localization and clock synchronization. We then present distributed state estimation approaches in parent and child agents that utilize the broadcast inter-agent information for joint estimation of spatiotemporal states. The simulations and real-world experiments based on ultra-wideband (UWB) illustrate that our proposed BLAS cannot only enable accurate, high-frequency and real-time estimation of relative position and clock parameters but also support theoretically an unlimited number of agents.