Bearing-only cooperative geo-localization using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, we present a cooperative approach to geo-localize a ground target using bearing-only localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). We design a distributed path planning algorithm using receding horizon control, which improves the localization accuracy of the target and of all of the air vehicles simultaneously while satisfying the observability conditions. We show that the cooperative bearing-only localization removes the constraint of having global position and heading information to all of the vehicles, as long as the sensor network is connected and at least one of the vehicle has GPS measurements. We include simulation results for bearing-only cooperative target geo-localization of a stationary and a mobile ground target demonstrating the feasibility of our proposed methods.