Cooperative Position and Orientation Estimation with Multi-Mode Antennas

Robotic multi-agent systems are envisioned for planetary exploration and terrestrial applications. Autonomous operation of robots requires estimations of their positions and orientations, which are obtained from the direction-of-arrival (DoA) and the time-of-arrival (ToA) of radio signals exchanged among the agents. In this thesis, we estimate the signal DoA and ToA using a multi-mode antenna (MMA). An MMA is a single antenna element, where multiple orthogonal current modes are excited by different antenna ports. We provide a first study on the use of MMAs for cooperative position and orientation estimation, specifically exploring their DoA estimation capabilities. Assuming the agents of a cooperative network are equipped with MMAs, lower bounds on the achievable position and orientation accuracy are derived. We realize a gap between the theoretical lower bounds and real-world performance of a cooperative radio localization system, which is caused by imperfect antenna and transceiver calibration. Consequentially, we theoretically analyze in-situ antenna calibration, introduce an algorithm for the calibration of arbitrary multiport antennas and show its effectiveness by simulation. To also improve calibration during operation, we propose cooperative simultaneous localization and calibration (SLAC). We show that cooperative SLAC is able to estimate antenna responses and ranging biases of the agents together with their positions and orientations, leading to considerably better position and orientation accuracy. Finally, we validate the results from theory and simulation by experiments with robotic rovers equipped with software-defined radios. In conclusion, we show that DoA estimation with an MMA is feasible, and accuracy can be improved by in-situ calibration and SLAC.