UAV Path Planning for Passive Emitter Localization

A path planning algorithm is presented for uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) trying to geolocate an emitter using passive payload sensors. The objective is to generate a sequence of waypoints for each vehicle that minimizes localization uncertainty. The path planning problem is cast as a nonlinear programming problem using an approximation of the Fisher information matrix (FIM) and solved at successive waypoints to generate vehicle trajectories. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated with simulation examples.