A Direct Position Determination Method Using Distributed UAVs With Synchronization Error

A direct position determination (DPD) method based on time difference of arrival (TDOA) using distributed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with a single antenna is studied, where the sensing data are influenced by the clock synchronization error among the UAVs, and a robust DPD method suitable for the scenario is proposed. First, the received data of the UAVs containing a synchronization error matrix are transformed into the frequency domain. Then, the subspace orthogonality is used to build the cost function for source localization. Next, the change of positions and signal receptions of the UAVs are implemented to solve the rank deficiency of the equations caused by unknown synchronization errors, and the minimized cost function is obtained by fusing all the cost functions. Compared to other DPD methods, the proposed method can achieve higher positioning accuracy in the scenario where synchronization error exists. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to other TDOA-based methods.