Association-Free Multilateration Based on Times of Arrival

Multilateration systems reconstruct the location of a target that transmits electromagnetic or acoustic signals. The employed measurements for localization are the times of arrival (TOAs) of the transmitted signal, measured by a number of spatially distributed receivers at known positions. We present a novel multilateration algorithm to localize multiple targets that transmit indistinguishable signals at unknown times. That is, each receiver measures merely a set of TOAs with no association to the targets. Our method does not need any prior information. Therefore, it can provide uncorrelated, static measurements to be introduced into a separate tracker subsequently, or an initialization routine for multi target trackers.