Patent ID: 8188923

Claim:
A method for locating one or more transmitters Ei in the potential presence of obstacles Rp in a network comprising at least one first receiving station A and one second receiving station B asynchronous with A comprising the following steps: the identification of a reference transmitter of known position E 0 by a calculation of the AOA-TDOA pair (θ ref , Δτ ref ) on the basis of the knowledge of the position E0 of the reference transmitter and of those of the stations at A and B; an estimation of the direction of arrival of the transmitter or transmitters and of the reflectors (or estimation of the AOA) on the first station A; the separation of the signals received on the first station A by spatial filtering in the direction of the source (transmitters and/obstacles); the separation of the incidences originating from the transmitters from those originating from the obstacles by inter-correlating the signals arising from the spatial filtering at A; the estimation of the time difference of arrival or TDOA of a source (transmitters and/obstacles) by inter-correlating the signal of the source (transmitters and/obstacles) received at A with the signals received on the second receiving station B: for each transmitter source Ei (or obstacles Rj) a pair (AOA, TDOA) is then obtained; a synthesis of the measurements of the pairs (AOAi, TDOAi) of each source (Ei, Rp) so as to enumerate the sources and to determine the means and standard deviation of their AOA and TDOA parameters; the determination of the error of synchronism between the receiving stations A and B by using the reference transmitter E 0 , and then the correction of this error on all the TDOAi of the pairs (AOAi, TDOAi) arising from the synthesis; the determination of the orientation error of the receiving station A by using the reference transmitter E 0 , and then the correction of this error on all the AOAi of the pairs (AOAi, TDOAi) arising from the synthesis; and the location of the various transmitters on the basis of each pair (AOAi, TDOAi).