Robust target localization in moving radar platform through semidefinite relaxation

Accurate target localization is an important task in various commercial and military applications. One way to achieve this goal is to use the time-of-arrival (TOA) or time-delay-of-arrival (TDOA) information observed at multiple distributed sensors. On the other hand, there is a great need to use moving sensors to form a radar platform with synthetic apertures. In this paper, we consider the problem of target localization based on the range information estimated from two-way time-of-flight (TW-TOF) at multiple synthetic array locations, where the position of these synthetic array locations is subject to certain random errors. The nonconvex estimation problem is approximated by a convex optimization problem using the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach. Simulation results show that the proposed estimator provides mean square position error performance close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound.