Monocular passive ranging of maneuvering intruder for UAS detect‐and‐avoid

Abstract

AbstractWe investigate a planar orbiting intruder passive ranging problem, where an ownship aircraft is moving with a constant velocity and a co‐planar intruder aircraft is conducting an orbiting maneuver. The objective is to estimate the state information of the intruder, such as range, speed and heading, using only bearing measurements of the intruder from the ownship. This is relevant to detect‐and‐avoid applications where an unmanned aerial system (UAS) is equipped with only a monocular camera sensor and needs to determine the range to the intruder. We utilize a filter bank algorithm parameterized with respect to the range, heading, and angular velocity of the intruder's initial states. In previous work, we performed investigations on the effects of parameterizing the filter bank algorithm and the system model using Monte Carlo Simulations. We extend our previous study to include a study on the effects of the ownship speed on the filter performance as well as a Cramer‐Rao lower bound comparison. Since the intruder's motion may be composed of straight legs and orbits, we integrate our filter bank algorithm into an Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) framework for two maneuver models: constant velocity and coordinated turn. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations of the IMM algorithm to study the effects of varying the IMM mixing stage frequency and the off diagonal values for the transition probability matrix. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.