On Quantification of Anchor Placement

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework to quantify how anchor placement affects localization accuracy, validated through experiments and field tests, and introduces a faster, more robust localization method called TPLM.

Contribution

It presents a novel theoretical approach to measure anchor placement impact and proposes the TPLM method that outperforms existing localization techniques in accuracy and robustness.

Findings

TPLM outperforms least-square in accuracy

TPLM is faster than gradient descent

TPLM is more noise-robust

Abstract

This paper attempts to answer a question: for a given traversal area, how to quantify the geometric impact of anchor placement on localization performance. We present a theoretical framework for quantifying the anchor placement impact. An experimental study, as well as the field test using a UWB ranging technology, is presented. These experimental results validate the theoretical analysis. As a byproduct, we propose a two-phase localization method (TPLM) and show that TPLM outperforms the least-square method in localization accuracy by a huge margin. TPLM performs much faster than the gradient descent method and slightly better than the gradient descent method in localization accuracy. Our field test suggests that TPLM is more robust against noise than the least-square and gradient descent methods.