Effectiveness of Mobile Emitter Location by Cooperative Swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Various Environmental Conditions

Abstract

This paper focused on assessing the effectiveness of the signal Doppler frequency (SDF) method to locate a mobile emitter using a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Based on simulation results, we showed the impact of various factors such as the number of UAVs, the movement parameters of the emitter and the sensors on location effectiveness. The study results also showed the dependence of the accuracy and continuity of the emitter coordinate estimation on the type of propagation environment, which was determined by line-of-sight (LOS) or non-LOS (NLOS) conditions. The applied research methodology allowed the selection of parameters of the analyzed location system that would minimize the error and maximize the monitoring time of the emitter position.

Frequency Instability Impact of Low-Cost SDRs on Doppler-Based Localization Accuracy

“…Equation (2) illustrates a simplified two-dimensional (2D) version of SDF which assumes that the sensor moves at a constant speed along a specific direction OX, i.e., , and at a specific height, i.e., Three-dimensional (3D) SDF is presented in [ 27 ]. In this case, the sensor can move in different directions with variable speed.…”

“…Measurements [ 30 ] have shown that using ground vehicles introduces limitations to the localization procedure, including difficulties in maintaining a constant speed, changing the sensor motion direction, and multipath propagation resulting from the neighborhood of terrain obstacles [ 32 ]. The use of UAVs [ 27 , 28 ] or watercrafts [ 33 ] for this purpose provides greater opportunities, provides greater movement freedom, and improves propagation conditions by minimizing the impact of unfavorable phenomena.…”

“…Under this grant, UAVs carrying out COMINT tasks in the field of spectrum monitoring and locating radio emitters will be developed. For the second task, we plan to use a Doppler-based localization method called the signal Doppler frequency (SDF) [ 27 , 28 ]. On the other hand, the localization of radio emitters is widely used in the civil market, including, among others, in positioning wireless network users or users who illegally use licensed frequency bands.…”

A Multi-Pulse Cross Ambiguity Function for the Wideband TDOA and FDOA to Locate an Emitter Passively

“…For the moving sensors, satellites in a group, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a sensor network [33,34], the transmit bandwidth cannot afford such data transmission volume. Thus, a multi-pulse cross ambiguity function (MPCAF) is proposed to reduce the data volume.…”

“…The primary difference from traditional methods is that compressed data are used for joint processing. The data volume is tiny, and it is unnecessary to restore the compressed data to the original since accurate TDOA and FDOA are obtained with (33) and (34). The results are shown in Figure 16.…”