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Volume 13 Issue 4
Apr.  2026

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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B. Cao, M. Jiang, S. Wang, M. Li, L. Cui, and B. Xu, “Improving cyclic positioning strategy accuracy of UWB system in complex underground environments,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 926–938, Apr. 2026. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125585
Citation: B. Cao, M. Jiang, S. Wang, M. Li, L. Cui, and B. Xu, “Improving cyclic positioning strategy accuracy of UWB system in complex underground environments,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 926–938, Apr. 2026. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125585

Improving Cyclic Positioning Strategy Accuracy of UWB System in Complex Underground Environments

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125585
Funds:  This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52574188), Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation Project (2308085ME150), the Major Science and Technology Project of Shanxi Province (202301010101002), Anhui Province Excellent Young Teachers Project (YQYB2024048), and Anhui Province Postdoctoral Project (2025B1062)
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  • The high-precision automatic positioning technology of the shearer is crucial for the automated and unmanned mining. However, the existing localization approaches commonly deliver inaccurate, unsatisfactory and unreliable results. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel cyclic positioning strategy to automatically migrate the anchor nodes group (ANG) after the completion of the current cutting operation, thereby achieving long-term period positioning. Meanwhile, we design an innovative technique that appropriately incorporates the shrinkage estimation method based on the minimum mean square error criterion (MMSEC), the improved diversity-guided quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO), and the extended Kalman filter (EKF) to enhance the localization accuracy of the ultra-wideband (UWB) system in each cycle positioning. Firstly, the cycle positioning strategy and the calculation method of the ANG coordinate position are proposed at the end of fully mechanized mining face. Secondly, the MMSEC method is developed by taking into account of the large measurement noise in the underground environments, and the improved diversity-guided QPSO method is implemented to optimize the result of MMSEC approach. Subsequently, the EKF is executed to suppress the influence of distance residuals on the positioning accuracy and further refine the final estimation accuracy. Lastly, the experimental investigation is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed cyclic positioning strategy. The experimental results sufficiently demonstrate that the developed MMSEC-QPSO-EKF technique significantly enhances localization accuracy and substantially outperforms the conventional methods, which is capable of achieving better estimation accuracy in each cycle positioning. The proposed cyclic positioning strategy can be successfully implemented, and the achieved accuracies are less than 0.2 m as the ANG is migrated three times, showcasing outstanding localization performance and robustness.

     

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