A Method to Estimate User Position and Orientation Based on Relative Position Measurement Between a Navigation Robot and a Smartphone

This paper proposes a method to estimate a smart-phone’s location and orientation using the relative position between it and a navigation robot. The relative position is measured by ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging and angle of arrival (AoA). The smartphone and navigation robot estimate their positions in their coordinate systems. The proposed method estimates the transformation of these two coordinate systems using UWB measurements. The localization error was evaluated by an experiment in a museum with six participants. As a result, the localization error of the proposed method was 0.40 m in the median, which is better than 0.65 m, the error with a baseline method that aligns coordinates at the start of localization. This method enables higher accuracy of smartphone localization for the users of navigation robots in short-term leave.