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Trilateration
Use of distances for determining unknown coordinates of a point / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Trilateration is the use of distances (or "ranges") for determining the unknown position coordinates of a point of interest, often around Earth (geopositioning).[1] When more than three distances are involved, it may be called multilateration, for emphasis.
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The distances or ranges might be ordinary Euclidean distances (slant ranges) or spherical distances (scaled central angles), as in true-range multilateration; or biased distances (pseudo-ranges), as in pseudo-range multilateration.
Trilateration or multilateration should not be confused with triangulation, which uses angles for positioning; and direction finding, which determines the line of sight direction to a target without determining the radial distance.