Three dimensional tracking of a maneuvering emitter utilizing doppler-bearing measurements of a constant velocity observer

Abstract

This manuscript handles a 3-D tracking problem, in which a 3-D observer with a constant velocity estimates the emitter state (position and velocity) while measuring the emitter’s elevation, azimuth angle, and doppler frequency. Conventional tracking filters are built assuming a constant velocity emitter, thus have difficulty in tracking a maneuvering emitter. This manuscript introduces the filter restart approach for tracking a maneuvering emitter in 3-D environments. As far as we know, this manuscript is novel in 3-D doppler-bearing problems so that a constant velocity observer can track a maneuvering emitter with zigzag trajectories. This paper is unique in presenting the observability analysis of 3-D doppler-bearing problems. The performance of the proposed tracking filter is verified by comparing it with 3-D Interacting Multiple Model Kalman filters under MATLAB simulations.