Quaternion-Driven High-Precision 3D Position and Orientation Tracking for mmWave Radio Systems Using Delay-Doppler Measurements

The recent development of mobile communication systems has introduced a myriad of new use cases from XR headsets to industrial automation, where high-precision 3D position and orientation information together with low latency operation, is of paramount importance. In this paper, we propose a novel high-precision 3D position and 3D orientation tracking scheme with per-antenna millimeter-wave delay-Doppler measurements, while considering a quaternion-based representation for the device orientation. Compared to representing the orientation with conventional yaw, pitch and roll angles, quaternion-based approach avoids problematic singular points and angle discontinuities, and provides stable tracking with all possible device orientations. The proposed tracking scheme is founded on extended Kalman filter, for which we derive and express all the needed processing steps for prediction and update stages. The numerical results show that the proposed approach is able to avoid the singular point issue faced with the conventional tracking of yaw, pitch and roll angles, while reaching the accuracy of a benchmark carrier phase based ranging method. Furthermore, by exploiting Doppler measurements’ capability to directly measure a device velocity and an angular velocity of device rotation, millimeter-level positioning accuracy and degree-level orientation estimation accuracy is reached in the considered tracking scenario.