Motion analysis of observer for bearings-only passive location and tracking

In bearings-only passive location and tracking, observer maneuver is critical to ensure observability and to obtain an accurate emitter location. In this paper, the author presents an observer maneuver control method based on minimizing the GDOP(geometrical dilution of precision) of target location, in order to achieve a best estimation accuracy at each second of location process. The method for optimizing observer courses in target tracking is verified to be same as in target location. Simulation results indicate that the adaptive observer maneuver method can achieve higher position estimate precision in shorter time for single observer tracking.