PALM: Precise Acoustic Localization for Mobile Targets With Doppler-Shift Compensation and Relative Distance Estimation

Acoustic indoor positioning systems offer advantages such as low cost and high accuracy. However, when tracking moving targets, their accuracy significantly degrades due to the Doppler effect and long signal reception intervals. To address the above issue, we present the precise acoustic localization for mobile targets (PALM) solution. PALM first obtains an unbiased time of arrival estimation using the proposed Doppler-shift compensation with multiple chirps (DSC-MC) method. It then compensates for the relative displacement between signals using the proposed instantaneous frequency integration (IFI) algorithm. Finally, PALM estimates the target’s position based on time difference of arrival and maximum likelihood estimation. Simulations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed IFI and DSC-MC methods and present their performance under different parameter settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the real-world accuracy of the proposed algorithms and verify that the PALM system achieves centimeter-level positioning accuracy and optimal algorithmic performance in mobile target localization scenarios.