Tracking of the UAV trajectory on the basis of bearing-only observations

Abstract

This work considers the tracking of the UAV (unmanned aviation vehicle) path on the basis of bearing-only observations including azimuth and elevation angles. The significance of this research becomes clear in the case when GPS either does not work at all or produce the high level of the measurement errors. It is assumed that either UAV's opto-electronic cameras or radar systems are able to capture the angular position of objects with known coordinates and to measure the azimuth and elevation angles of the sight line. Such measurements involve the real position of UAV in implicit form, and therefore some of nonlinear filters such as Extended Kalman filter (EKF) or others may be used in order to implement these measurements for UAV control. However, all such approximate nonlinear filters produce the estimations with unknown bias and quadratic errors. This peculiarity prevents the data fusion in more or less regular way. Meanwhile, there is well-known method of pseudomeasurements which reduces the estimation problem to the linear settings. In this article we develop the modified pseudomeasurement method without bias and with the possibility to evaluate the second moments of the UAV position errors which helps to realize the data fusion. On the basis of this filtering algorithm we develop the control algorithm for tracking of given reference path under external perturbation and noised angular measurements. Modelling examples show the nice performance of the control algorithm.