Mosaic Zonotope Shadow Matching for Risk-Aware Autonomous Localization in Harsh Urban Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces Mosaic Zonotope Shadow Matching (MZSM), a risk-aware localization method for urban GNSS that provides certifiable uncertainty bounds and improves accuracy in complex environments.

Contribution

We extend prior shadow matching work with a classifier-agnostic mosaic architecture that offers risk-awareness and guarantees on urban positioning accuracy.

Findings

MZSM yields certifiable uncertainty bounds in urban GNSS localization.

The method efficiently computes a mosaic from 14 satellites in under a second.

It improves localization accuracy and risk assessment compared to existing shadow matching techniques.

Abstract

Risk-aware urban localization with the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) remains an unsolved problem with frequent misdetection of the user's street or side of the street. Significant advances in 3D map-aided GNSS use grid-based GNSS shadow matching alongside AI-driven line-of-sight (LOS) classifiers and server-based processing to improve localization accuracy, especially in the cross-street direction. Our prior work introduces a new paradigm for shadow matching that proposes set-valued localization with computationally efficient zonotope set representations. While existing literature improved accuracy and efficiency, the current state of shadow matching theory does not address the needs of risk-aware autonomous systems. We extend our prior work to propose Mosaic Zonotope Shadow Matching (MZSM) that employs a classifier-agnostic polytope mosaic architecture to provide risk-awareness and certifiable guarantees on urban positioning. We formulate a recursively expanding binary tree that refines an initial location estimate with set operations into smaller polytopes. Together, the smaller polytopes form a mosaic. We weight the tree branches with the probability that the user is in line of sight of the satellite and expand the tree with each new satellite observation. Our method yields an exact shadow matching distribution from which we guarantee uncertainty bounds on the user localization. We perform high-fidelity simulations using a 3D building map of San Francisco to validate our algorithm's risk-aware improvements. We demonstrate that MZSM provides certifiable guarantees across varied data-driven LOS classifier accuracies and yields a more precise understanding of the uncertainty over existing methods. We validate that our tree-based construction is efficient and tractable, computing a mosaic from 14 satellites in 0.63 seconds and growing quadratically in the satellite number.