Tracking and interception of ground-based RF sources using autonomous guided munitions with passive bearings-only sensors and tracking algorithms

This paper considers the problem of tracking and intercepting a potentially moving ground-based RF source with an autonomous guided munition that has a passive bearings-only sensor located on its nose. It is assumed that the munition has lost GPS signal lock and that it relies only on its noisy inertial measurement unit (IMU) for guidance and navigation. Bearings-only target motion analysis (TMA) algorithms are used to obtain a position and velocity estimate for the RF source using the position, velocity and attitude estimates of the munition as well as the azimuth and elevation measurements obtained from the bearings-only RF sensor. Six degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) and three degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) munition models are used to evaluate the tracking and intercept/seeker performance of a hybrid coordinate (HC) extended Kalman filter (EKF), a particle filter (PF), a multiple hypothesis (MH) HC-EKF, and a pseudo-linear least squares (PLLS) filter.