NLoS Mitigation with Propagation Reliability Estimation for Track-Constrained UWB/IMU Fusion Localization

Ultra-wideband (UWB) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) fusion is an effective scheme for train and rail-guided target localization because UWB provides absolute ranging results and the IMU provides high-rate motion prediction. In practical rail transportation systems, UWB anchors are usually deployed along the track with large longitudinal intervals and limited lateral separation to reduce installation and maintenance costs. This anchor deployment leads to a large condition number of the observation matrix, so slight ranging errors caused by non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation may be amplified into large localization errors. To mitigate LoS/NLoS interference, this article proposes a propagation reliability estimation method for track-constrained UWB/IMU fusion localization. First, rail transportation localization along a narrow path is formulated as a one-dimensional track-constrained problem, and each UWB ranging result is converted into a candidate longitudinal coordinate on the known track centerline. Second, the reliability of each anchor–target propagation is estimated in a sliding window by comparing the motion increments solved by UWB observations with the motion prediction by the IMU. Third, the estimated reliability is incorporated into a reliability-weighted track-domain update before a closed-loop position–velocity Kalman correction. The simulation results show that, under the mixed LoS/NLoS scenario, the proposed method achieves an NLoS-interval RMSE of 0.0090 m. Compared with Track-EKF, Track-Gauss-AUKF, Track-Adaptive KF, and Track-SW-FGO, the proposed method reduces the NLoS-interval RMSE by 92.9%, 62.1%, 92.8%, and 92.6%. A supplementary real-data stress test on the public STAR-loc dataset demonstrates an average longitudinal RMSE of 0.0555 m under a strict online calibrated-range protocol, supporting the algorithm’s practical applicability against real-world lateral sway and asynchronous sensor noise.