Path planning for two unmanned aerial vehicles in passive localization of radio sources

This paper studies the trajectory control problem for a pair of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with time of arrival (TOA) sensors to measure the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of the transmitted radio signal to localize the source. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is applied to estimate the source's position. The proposed trajectory control strategy encompasses three optimum experimental design criteria based on the position error covariance produced by the EKF. The control strategy steers the UAVs to the positions to minimize the uncertainty about the location of the source. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated through simulation examples.