UAVs-assisted passive source localization using robust TDOA ranging for search and rescue

Abstract

Estimating the location of a target in search-and-rescue operations is quite challenging when the target is not responding. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the passive target localization problem using mobile unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where multiple mobile UAVs receive the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements from the source UAV. Unlike traditional TDOA for static UAVs, the problem becomes more challenging when considering the mobility of UAVs. Therefore, we propose a novel TDOA model for target localization with mobile UAVs. We also measure the performance limit inequality between its Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and the mean-squared error (MSE).