Moving target localization in distributed MIMO radar systems with sensor position errors in the presence of a calibration object

Abstract

This paper investigates the moving target localization problem in distributed multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) radars with sensor position errors. Unlike the previous work, by invoking a moving calibration object, we develop a closed-form solution to determine the position and velocity of the unknown target for alleviating the performance degradation caused by sensor position errors in traditional methods. The proposed method has three stages. The calibration object is utilized in the first stage to estimate the sensor position errors and improve the sensor parameters, and these parameters are devoted to establishing the pseudo-linear equations by introducing nuisance variables in the second stage. After solving the pseudo-linear equations, the target parameters are refined by exploiting the relationships between the extra variables and target parameters in the final stage. The proposed method is shown analytically to reach the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) performance under sufficiently small measurement noise and sensor localization error conditions, and it can be easily extended to general cases where exist imprecise calibration object parameters or multiple calibration objects. Simulation results corroborate the theoretical analysis and show that the proposed method has a significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.