An Investigation of Using Rigid Body Receivers for Locating a Non-Cooperative Object by Pseudo-Ranges in the Absence of Synchronization

A traditional receiver has only one sensor to observe the signal from an object for localization. This research investigates the extension of a receiver to a rigid body (RB) that has several sensors attached to its different spots for non-cooperative localization. In addition to the position uncertainties of RB receivers as in a typical wireless sensing network, their orientations may not be known. We show that using RB receivers relieves the stringent requirement of synchronization among them for locating a non-cooperative object by time observations, even without knowledge about the orientations of the RBs. The minimum number of illuminators, RB receivers and sensors, as well as the geometry requirement to achieve localization are established, for the cases of without and with the availability of inaccurate orientations. The optimum placements of the sensors within an RB receiver and the RBs in the localization space are derived to achieve the A-optimality for the object location estimation under Gaussian noise. Simulation results confirm well the developed theories.