Performance bounds for relative configuration and global transformation in cooperative localization

Cooperative localization introduces internode measurements to provide the node relative locations instead of absolute locations. This paper decomposes the absolute locations into relative configuration and global transformation, where the former can be specified by the internode measurements while the latter requires reference information. This decomposition can be used to investigate the relative localization which uses only internode measurements and the absolute localization with the consideration of anchor location uncertainty. After deriving the coordinate representations, error metric, and performance bounds for the global transformation, we evaluate the performance of a node location calibration that uses the measurements from sources in unknown locations.