Determining Global Position from Local Position in Military Force Position Tracking Application

Integrated Command and Control System (ICCS) in military terms is a system that has friendly forces position tracking to avoid friendly fire. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) that commonly used to acquire position data sometimes have a trouble locking the satellites. This paper discusses how the trilateration is used as a backup system to determine the global position in case the GNSS data is invalid. The system consists of 4 nodes, where 3 nodes act as an anchor and 1 node act as a tag. All nodes equipped with GNSS so the anchor can move to other position. When the GNSS module doesn’t send a valid data to a node, the node will act as a tag node and do the trilateration by measuring distance using ultra-wideband with time-of-flight method to the 3 other nodes that acting as anchors. Based on the tests, the position from trilateration and the position from GNSS are 2.43 meters apart. Distance measurement has an average error below 0.6 meters. The trilateration position error is up to 1 meter without the effect from the anchor’s GNSS position error, and the average error is up to 12 meters with the influence from the anchor’s GNSS position error.