Patent ID: 8089827

Claim:
A method for localization of M remote devices ( 3 ′, 3 ″, . . . 3 M ) by their coordinates within an N-dimensional system, through a) the emission of acoustical pulses and b) the emission of radiofrequency pulse from each remote device ( 3 ′, 3 ″, . . . 3 M ), at the time of detection of said acoustical wave front by its on-board microphone, and c) the acquisition from a radio base ( 2 ) unit, of the radiofrequency signals and time delays which are proportional to the distance (d ij ) between the i-th acoustical source ( 4 ) and the remote j-th device ( 3 ); comprising: d—for each emission from the i-th source, successive insertion of components in a reception vector (D i ), formed by the sequence of distances obtained from the product of the arrival time delays with an estimated sound velocity, said vector, i—in the absence of disturbances, having a maximum length M corresponding to the number of remote devices; ii—in presence of disturbances of an acoustical or electromagnetic kind, that could erroneously be interpreted as additional reception signals, being “oversized” according to the noise/disturbances, the number of evaluations being increased up to L 1 ·L 2 · . . . L N+1 , with L i >M; e—repetition of the steps a, b, c, d for all N+1 acoustical sources, in order to form N+1 reception vectors; f—the calculation of the position X j =(x 1j , x 2j , . . . x Nj ) of the j-th remote device, starting from the N+1 distances d 1j , d 2j , . . . d N+1j , as the intersection point of N+1 spheres of radius d ij centred at the positions (x Si , y Si , z Si , where I=1, 2, . . . N+1), of the N+1 acoustical sources.