Self Localization of acoustic sensors and actuators on Distributed platforms

In this paper we present a novel algorithm to automatically determine the relative 3D positions of sensors and actuators in an ad-hoc distributed network of heterogeneous general purpose computing platforms such as laptops, PDAs and tablets. A closed form approximate solution is derived using the technique of metric multidimensional scaling, which is further refined by minimizing a non-linear error function. Our formulation and solution accounts for the errors in localization, due to lack of temporal synchronization among different platforms. The theoretical performance limit for the sensor positions is derived via the Cramér-Rao bound and analyzed with respect to the number of sensors and actuators as well as their geometry. Extensive simulation results are reported together with a discussion of the practical issues in a real-time system.