An Effective Guidance Scheme for Passive Tracking Using a Quantized Bearing-only Sensor

A novel scheme of maneuvering the passive homing underwater interceptor for extraction of target parameters in the face of quantized sensor output is proposed and implemented for the vehicle with realistic parameters and specifications. Underwater environment is characterized by high noise. Typically, low cost acoustic sensors (fitted on underwater interceptors) give quantized output. Although bearing only tracking has been dealt with extensively in literature, it considers bearings corrupted by white noise with a small standard deviation. This assumption is far from the practical scenario. Estimation algorithms like EKF and pseudo-linear KF give erroneous results, due to the presence of a large quantization error in bearing, if applied directly.