An Investigation on Observer Minimum Circumnavigation Velocity for Bearings-Only Target Tracking

Circumnavigating and tracking a moving target with bearing measurements by only a single observer is an attractive technology in passive target tracking. Reducing the energy consumption of the observer in circumnavigation tracking is an urgent problem. Therefore, observer minimum circumnavigation velocity is investigated in this work for such circumnavigation tracking systems. First, based on the passive tracking method of the virtual intersecting localization algorithm (VILA) proposed by the authors, the geometric characteristics of the intersection line of sight are analyzed by considering the target-state prediction error and bearing measurement error. Second, based on the normal distribution assumption of states prediction error and bearings measurement error, the observer minimum circumnavigation velocity is deduced for no ill conditions in VILA. Finally, a target moving in a straight line and constant speed turning is selected to simulate the proposed theoretical results with observer velocity below and above the minimum circumnavigation velocity level. The probabilities of ill conditions of VILA are counted, and the simulation results verify the correctness of the proposed theory.