  This paper studies a coordinate alignment problem for cooperative mobile
sensor network localization with range-based measurements. The network consists
of target nodes, each of which has only access position information in a local
fixed coordinate frame, and anchor nodes with GPS position information. To
localize target nodes, we aim to align their coordinate frames, which leads to
a non-convex optimization problem over a rotation group $\text{SO}(3)$. Then,
we reformulate it as an optimization problem with a convex objective function
over spherical surfaces. We explicitly design both iterative and recursive
algorithms for localizing a target node with an anchor node, and extend to the
case with multiple target nodes. Finally, the advantages of our algorithms
against the literature are validated via simulations.
