  To navigate reliably in indoor environments, an industrial autonomous vehicle
must know its position. However, current indoor vehicle positioning
technologies either lack accuracy, usability or are too expensive. Thus, we
propose a novel concept called local reference point assisted active radar
positioning, which is able to overcome these drawbacks. It is based on
distributing passive retroreflectors in the indoor environment such that each
position of the vehicle can be identified by a unique reflection characteristic
regarding the reflectors. To observe these characteristics, the autonomous
vehicle is equipped with an active radar system. On one hand, this paper
presents the basic idea and concept of our new approach towards indoor vehicle
positioning and especially focuses on the crucial placement of the reflectors.
On the other hand, it also provides a proof of concept by conducting a full
system simulation including the placement of the local reference points, the
radar-based distance estimation and the comparison of two different positioning
methods. It successfully demonstrates the feasibility of our proposed approach.
