Underwater Target Tracking Using Bearing-Only Measurements

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to estimate target coordinates and velocity. Target tracking is performed by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The observer is equipped with the direction finder that measures the azimuth and elevation angles of the target and the target range. Such problems are normally solved with the aid of non-linear filters due to nonlinearity of measurements. However, most filters produce estimations with unknown bias in the absence of estimations of accuracy. An important problem is related to unobservability of the target. A pseudomeasurement method is proposed to transform the problem of estimation into a linear problem. Such an approach makes possible to estimate coordinates and velocity of a moving target and solve the problem of unobservability. Results of computer simulation prove efficiency of the proposed algorithm in the problem of passive target tracking when only angles are measured.