A global ultrasonic sensor system for self-localization of a mobile robot is proposed in this paper. The global ultrasonic sensor system consists of three or more ultrasonic transmitters fixed at some positions in the world coordinate and receivers in the moving coordinate of a mobile robot. In this global sensor system it is easy to get state vector of the mobile robot in the world coordinate from the distance information between each ultrasonic transmitter and receiver. An extended kalman filter algorithm is used to process the noisy ultrasonic signal and to estimate the state vector. In case of using several independent ultrasonic transmitters, it is necessary to avoid the cross talk among the ultrasonic waves and to synchronize between each ultrasonic transmitter and receiver. The small sized radio frequency modules are adopted to solve the cross talk and the synchronization problem Computer simulation and experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ultrasonic sensor system.