Routing Optimization of Unmanned AVS for Localization of Wireless Emitters in Outside Locations

Abstract

To control illegal radio waves, methods of locating unknown emitters are used. Location methods using ground sensors suffer from location accuracy degradation in environments where the distance between the emitter and the sensor is not line of sight (NLoS). Therefore, research is being done to improve location accuracy by using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as sensors to ensure a line-of-sight (LoS) condition. However, UAVs can fly freely in the sky, making it difficult to optimize flight paths based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) for efficient and accurate localization. This article examines the optimization of UAV flight paths to achieve highly efficient and accurate external localization of unknown emitters through two approaches, a circular orbit and a free path, respectively. Our numerical results reveal the improved location estimation error performance of our proposed approach. In particular, when evaluating at the 90th percentile of the cumulative error distribution function (CDF), the proposed approach can achieve an error of 28.59 m with circular orbit and 12.91 m with free path orbit, compared to the case of the conventional fixed sensor. whose location estimation error is 55.02 m.