3D angle-of-arrival positioning using von Mises-Fisher distribution

We propose modeling an angle-of-arrival (AOA) positioning measurement as a von Mises–Fisher (VMF) distributed unit vector instead of the conventional normally distributed azimuth and elevation measurements. Describing the 2dimensional AOA measurement with three numbers removes discontinuities and reduces nonlinearity at the poles of the azimuth–elevation coordinate system. Our computer simulations show that the proposed VMF measurement noise model based filters outperform the normal distribution based algorithms in accuracy in a scenario where close-to-pole measurements occur frequently.