Cooperative Localization of Firefighters Based on Relative Ranging Constraints of UWB and Autonomous Navigation

There are many demands for the cooperative localization (CL) of multiple people, such as firefighter rescue. The classical foot-mounted inertial navigation based on zero velocity update (ZUPT) suffers from accumulating error due to low-cost sensor, and pre-placed anchors in ultra-wideband (UWB) system limit application an unknown environment. In this study, a group sensors including measurement unit (IMU), magnetometer, barometer, UWB sensor is used. Through different characteristics position relationship between using extended Kalman filter three-dimensional tracking proposed. Ranging information firefighters utilized, couplings introduced by relative estimated. Two experiments designed verify proposed algorithm building forest environments. Compared with results single-person navigation, average positioning precision is, respectively, improved 38.93% 79.01%. This approach successfully suppresses divergence errors, fixed not needed.