In the global positioning system (GPS) denied environment, an indoor positioning system based on ultra-wide band (UWB) technology has been utilized for target location and navigation. It can provide a more accurate positioning measurement than those based on received signal strength (RSS). Although promising, it suffers from some shortcomings that base stations should be preinstalled to obtain reference coordinate information, just as navigation satellites in the GPS system. In order to improve the positioning accuracy, a large number of base stations should be preinstalled and assigned coordinates in the large-scale network. However, the coordinate setup process of the base stations is cumbersome, time consuming, and laborious. For a class of linear network topology, a semi-autonomous coordinate configuration technology of base stations is designed, which refers to three conceptions of segmentation, virtual triangle, and bidirectional calculation. It consists of two stages in every segment: Forward and backward. In the forward stage, it utilizes the manual coordinate setup method to deal with the foremost two base stations, and then the remaining base stations autonomously calculate their coordinates by building the virtual triangle train. In the backward stage, the reverse operation is performed, but the foremost two base stations of the next segment should be used as the head. In the last segment, the last two base stations should be used as the head. Integrating forward and backward data, the base stations could improve their location accuracy. It is shown that our algorithm is feasible and practical in simulation results and can dramatically reduce the system configuration time. In addition, the error and maximum base station number for one segment caused by our algorithm are discussed theoretically.
