TDOA Geolocation with the Unscented Kalman Filter

Abstract

We consider passive geolocation of a radio frequency emitter via time difference of arrival methods. In a previous work, we presented a method for geolocation by a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with passive radar sensors, based on adaptive repositioning of the vehicles to minimize a cost function. In this paper we experiment with the unscented Kalman filter to determine whether or not it provides a better implementation of this approach. Simulation results indicate that the unscented filter provides marginally better performance in terms of mean target location error, compared with our previous results, but requires proper initialization.