A quadrant-based location tracking method

In the problem of location tracking based on the range measurement from at least three sensors, the nonlinear measurement equations are often linearized locally about the true position. Because the high-order terms are neglected, the approximation error is inevitably introduced into the result of location tracking. In this paper, a novel quadrant linearization method is proposed to overcome this drawback. Unlike the rectangular coordinate system, which has only four quadrants, the area coordinate system has seven quadrants. Using this enhanced quadrant information and the linear relationship between the above two coordinate systems, the exactly linear measurement equations replace the nonlinear ones and improve the position estimate.