A survey on concurrent network localization for autonomous multi-vehicle systems

Network localization plays the key role in position based operations and services of autonomous multi-vehicle systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite formation, which aims to determine the Euclidean coordinates of all the vehicles given a collection of inter-vehicle measurements and the Euclidean coordinates of a small number of vehicles. Concurrent network localization approaches allow each vehicle solve its own coordinate in a distributed manner via local information exchange with its neighbors and thus exhibit many desirable advantages in applications. This paper reviews recent development on concurrent network localization algorithms and aims to provide a comprehensive insight for these novel ideas. In terms of the types of inter-vehicle information, distance-based, bearing-based, and relative-position-based concurrent network localization are discussed in a unified framework.