Practical ship positioning technology for general asynchronous marine network

Relative positioning, which is used in the flight of spacecraft with flying in formation, satellite network, and mobile robot network and so on, is highly available scheme for marine intelligent transportation network to guarantee the positioning accuracy and performance. Currently, some ship relative positioning method based on the original measurement and local positioning estimate in marine ship network have been researched. Whereas, these ship relative positioning researches only make an attempt to get the novel practical positioning technology, so some assumptions are made such as synchronous working with uniform initiative time for every ship's positioning system and without data delay from other ship nodes to target ship. Therefore, these algorithms are all theoretic and not practical. Synchronously, the distributed structure with local estimate transmission is more effective than the centralized form with original positioning measurement. In order to establish the practical ship relative positioning method, the asynchronous working model across ships and data delay are both considered in this paper. Accordingly, a novel practical ship relative positioning method for general asynchronous marine network is presented. The theoretic analysis and simulation example both show the validity and practicability of the proposed method.