Narrowband Source Localization from a Moving Array of Sensors

We consider the problem of using a small number of mobile sensors as a sensor array which repositions itself to improve estimates for the range and bearing of a narrowband, stationary target. Mounting sensors to micro-unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAVs) pragmatically guarantees the sensor spacing will be much greater than the Nyquist sampling distance which can cause spatial aliasing. The MUSIC algorithm can be used to search for the spectral peak corresponding the direction of arrival (DOA), but further effort is needed to discern it from a multitude of ambiguous peaks that arise from the use of a very sparse array. As the array is moved to different positions, the received signal strength (RSS) can be used to provide rough estimates to reduce the MUSIC search space and help select the most likely intersection among the ambiguous spectral peaks from each position.