Distributed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Positioning for Multitarget Tracking with Bearing-Only Information

This paper proposes a distributed positioning algorithm for a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to track multiple moving targets with bearing-only measurements. An approximate performance metric is first derived that can be used in position determination based on the properties of multisensor joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) filter. A fully distributed position planning algorithm using incremental optimization strategy is then proposed for tracking multiple moving targets. Simulation examples with comparison results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.