In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically determine the positions of sensors and actuators in an ad-hoc distributed network of heterogeneous general purpose computing platforms. The formulation and solution accounts for the limited precision in temporal synchronization. The theoretical performance limit for the sensor positions is derived via the Cram´er-Rao bound. We analyze the sensitivity of localization accuracy with respect to the number of sensors and actuators as well as their geometry. Extensive Monte Carlo simulation results are reported together with a discussion of the real-time system. In a distributed test platform consisting of 4 speakers and 4 microphones, the sensors’ and actuators’ three dimensional locations could be estimated with an average bias of 0.08 cm and average standard deviation of 3 cm.
Vikas C. Raykar, Igor Kozintsev, Rainer Lienhart