A Distributed Cooperative Localization Strategy in Vehicular-to-Vehicular Networks

This work develops a distributed message-passing approach to cooperative localization for autonomous mobile vehicles that communicate via mm-wave wireless connection in vehicle-to-vehicle networks. Vehicles in the network obtain the measurement information about the relative distance and the angle of arrival from the mm-wave connections made with each other. Some vehicles may obtain knowledge about their absolute position information of different quality, for example, via additional localization feature. The main objective is to estimate the locations of all vehicles using reciprocal exchanges of simple information called a message in a distributed and autonomous way. A simulation is developed to examine the performance of the localization and navigation of vehicles under various network configurations. The results show that it does provide better positioning results in most cases and there are also several cases where the use of the cooperative technique adapts to design parameters such as accuracies of measurement equipment, and initial position estimates, that can affect the localization performance.