Tracking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on the Kalman Filter Considering Uncertainty and Error Aware

Abstract

Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have made significant impacts on our daily lives with the advancement of technologies and their applications. Tracking UAVs have become more important because they not only provide location-based services, but are also faced with serious security threats and vulnerabilities. UAVs are smaller in nature, move with high speed, and operate in a low-altitude environment, which makes it conceivable to track UAVs using fixed or mobile radars. Kalman Filter (KF)-based methodologies are widely used for extracting valuable trajectory information from samples composed of noisy information. As UAVs’ trajectories resemble uncertain behavior, the traditional KF-based methodologies have poor tracking accuracy. Recently, the Diffusion-Map-based KF (DMK) was introduced for modeling uncertainties in the environment without prior knowledge. However, the model has poor accuracy when operating in environments with higher noise. In order to achieve better tracking performance, this paper presents the Uncertainty and Error-Aware KF (UEAKF) for tracking UAVs. The UEAKF-based tracking method provides a good tradeoff among preceding estimate confidence and forthcoming measurement under dynamic environments; the resulting filter is robust and nonlinear in nature. The experimental results showed that the UEAKF-based UAV tracking model achieves much better Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) performance compared to the existing particle filter-based and DMK-based UAV tracking models.