Optimal observer trajectories for bearings only tracking by minimizing the trace of the Cramer-Rao lower bound

This paper compares two performance indices for computing optimal observer paths for the bearings-only source localization and tracking problem, for constant velocity sources. Previous work on this problem is based on maximizing the determinant of the Fisher information matrix (FIM) of the estimation problem. This paper considers minimizing the trace of a weighted sum of the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of current or future source position errors, and source velocity errors. Quasi-Newton optimization is used to compare optimal observer paths, given three distinct goals: minimizing current position error, velocity error, and future position error. Significant differences in optimal paths are observed, and the CRLB trace is found to yield smaller estimation ambiguity