Optimal Guidance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Emitter Location

This paper provides a solution to guidance of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles that carry sensors for locating a detected emitter of radio frequency signals. Guidance in this paper refers to updating the state of each vehicle to the most desirable position and velocity, reachable within a given time for the location purpose. The vehicles can then be guided to the updated sensor states for further target data acquisition and processing. This process continues until the target is located within a specified accuracy. Both the guidance criterion and the vehicle state update procedure take the probability of vehicle loss into consideration. Vehicle state update is formulated and solved as an optimization problem. The enhanced location performance under the optimized guidance, and the sensor system tolerance to vehicle loss are shown for a foursensor system through simulations.