Cooperative Tracking by Multi-Agent Systems Using Signals of Opportunity

Abstract

The omnipresent signals of opportunity (SOOP) enable an effective way for passive target tracking using multiple agents. However, cooperative target tracking via non-cooperative SOOP is challenging since the positions of agents are not precisely known. In this paper, we determine the performance bounds of cooperative tracking using SOOP by multiple asynchronous agents equipped with antenna arrays. The Fisher information matrix of joint target and agent positions can be decomposed as the sum of the information from SOOP and self-localization networks, where the correlation of signals introduces an additional Fisher information component and the multipath effect is characterized by path-overlap coefficients. We demonstrate how the location information coupling between the target and agents affects localization accuracy and how the cooperation among agents improves tracking performance. Moreover, the angular information is shown to mitigate multipath and asynchronous effects by spatiotemporal separation and time-independent measurements, respectively. Then we propose a distributed hybrid belief propagation based algorithm for cooperative tracking and network synchronization via likelihood consensus. Finally, numerical results validate our theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed algorithm.