Kinetic-Rover-Assisted Autonomous Coordinate Establishment for Ground-Based Positioning System

Ground-based positioning systems (GBPSs) can provide high-precision positioning services via carrier phase ranging. The prerequisite for GBPSs to provide positioning services is to determine the accurate position of base stations. Most existing methods can either obtain the coordinates of base stations through external measurement, which is time-consuming and laborious, or use a rover with known clock drift to autonomously obtain the coordinates of base stations, the assumption of which cannot be satisfied in some scenarios. The limitations of these methods hinder the rapid deployment and application of GBPSs. This paper proposes a kinetic-rover-assisted autonomous coordinate establishment (K-ACE) method under the condition of no anchor and unknown rover clock drift. This approach provides the estimate of rover clock drift and obtains the refined estimates of base station coordinates and rover coordinates. Numerical simulations show that the K-ACE method can obtain high-precision estimates of rover clock drift, while the localization performance is comparable to that of the existing method where known rover clock drift is required and approaches the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). Real-world experiments validated that the proposed method can achieve centimeter-level localization accuracy. Therefore, the rapid deployment of GBPSs can be realized with unknown rover clock drift.