Integrated IMU and radiolocation-based navigation using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter

In this paper, we develop a cooperative IMU/radio-location-based navigation system, where each node tracks the location not only based on its own measurements, but also via collaboration with neighbor nodes. The key problem is to design a nonlinear filter to fuse IMU and radiolocation information. We apply the Rao-Blackwellization method by using a particle filter and parallel Kalman filters for the estimation of orientation and other states (i.e., position, velocity, etc.), respectively. The proposed method significantly outperforms the extended Kalman filter (EKF) in the set of simulations here.