Observer motion controls for multiple targets considering Doppler-bearing measurements

Abstract

The Doppler-Bearing Target Motion Analysis (DBTMA) problem arises in various military applications related to target tracking. The DBTMA problem is to estimate the position and velocity of a target using both frequency and bearing measurements. As the method to increase the estimation accuracy in the DBTMA problem, this paper introduces observer motion controls under the following motion constraints: the observer moves with a constant speed, and the turn rate of the observer is upper bounded by a certain maximum turn rate. Since the target state is unknown to the observer in practical scenarios, we perform simultaneous target state estimation and observer motion controls at each time step. In this way, our motion controls at each time step are based on the most recent estimation results, which represent current target states most accurately. In realistic scenarios, there may be more than one target. Thus, we tackle the case where the observer needs to localize more than one target. Our observer motion controls are simple to implement in real-time systems and can easily handle various practical factors such as collision avoidance and varying bearing standard deviation according to ship-relative bearing. We verify the effectiveness of our observer motion controls using MATLAB simulations.