Cooperative GPS Localization for Stationless Shared Bikes

Stationless bike sharing systems allow the bikes to be dropped off freely and to be found through GPS localization. Such flexibility has made it highly popular in an increasing number of cities. However, GPS often performs poorly in urban areas with dense high-rise building, making bikes search a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel cooperative GPS approach to address the problem. The method first organizes a group of shared bikes into a network, called a BikeNet, in a crowdsourcing manner. Then the constructed network maps all the nodes' GPS raw measurements to a lead node's view, to determine an accurate GPS location for each node. Experiment results show that BikeNet improves the localization accuracy by 2.96x and 4.8x, compared with the classic GPS method.