Cooperative Multi-Point Vehicular Positioning Using Millimeter-Wave Surface Reflection

Multi-point vehicular positioning is an essential operation for autonomous vehicles. However, the state-of-the-art positioning technologies, relying on reflected signals from a target (i.e., RADAR and LIDAR), cannot work without line-of-sight (LoS). Besides, it takes significant time for environment scanning and object recognition with potential detection inaccuracy, especially in complex urban situations. Some recent fatal accidents involving autonomous vehicles further expose such limitations. In this article, we aim at overcoming these limitations by proposing a novel relative positioning approach, called Cooperative Multi-point Positioning (COMPOP). The COMPOP establishes cooperation between a target vehicle (TV) and a sensing vehicle (SV) if a LoS path exists, where a TV explicitly lets an SV to know the TV’s existence by transmitting positioning waveforms. This cooperation makes it possible to remove the time-consuming scanning and target recognizing processes, facilitating real-time positioning. One prerequisite for the cooperation is a clock synchronization between a pair of TV and SV. To this end, we use a phase-differential-of-arrival (PDoA) based approach to remove the TV-SV clock difference from the received signal. With clock difference correction, the TV’s position can be obtained via peak detection over a 3D power spectrum constructed by a Fourier transform (FT) based algorithm. The COMPOP also incorporates nearby vehicles, without knowing their locations, into the above cooperation for the case without a LoS path. Specifically, several strong non-LoS (NLoS) links from the TV to the SV can be generated via mirror-like reflections over the neighboring vehicles’ metal surfaces. Following the same procedures in the LoS case, virtual TVs mirrored by nearby vehicles can be detected. By exploiting the geometric relation between the virtual and actual TVs, COMPOP can be achieved by intelligently combining the virtual TVs to position the actual TV. The effectiveness of the COMPOP is verified by several simulations concerning practical channel parameters.