To navigate reliably in indoor environments, an industrial autonomous vehicle must know its position. However, current indoor vehicle positioning technologies either lack accuracy, usability or are too expensive. Thus, we propose a novel concept called local reference point assisted active radar positioning, which is able to overcome these drawbacks. It is based on distributing passive retroreflectors in the indoor environment such that each position of the vehicle can be identified by a unique reflection characteristic regarding the reflectors. To observe these characteristics, the autonomous vehicle is equipped with an active radar system. On one hand, this paper presents the basic idea and concept of our new approach towards indoor vehicle positioning and especially focuses on the crucial placement of the reflectors. On the other hand, it also provides a proof of concept by conducting a full system simulation including the placement of the local reference points, the radar-based distance estimation and the comparison of two different positioning methods. It successfully demonstrates the feasibility of our proposed approach.

翻译：为在室内环境中实现可靠导航，工业自主车辆必须获知其位置。然而，当前室内车辆定位技术或精度不足、或易用性差、或成本过高。为此，我们提出一种名为"局部参考点辅助主动雷达定位"的新颖概念，能够克服上述缺陷。该概念通过在室内环境中分布无源后向反射器，使得车辆的每个位置都能通过反射器独特的反射特征被识别。为观测这些特征，自主车辆配备主动雷达系统。一方面，本文阐述了面向室内车辆定位新方法的基本思路与概念，尤其聚焦反射器的关键部署问题；另一方面，通过包含局部参考点布置、基于雷达的距离估计以及两种不同定位方法对比的完整系统仿真，提供了概念验证。实验成功证明了所提方法的可行性。