Three Passive TDOA-AOA Receivers-Based Flying-UAV Positioning in Extreme Environments

In this paper, motivated by the fact that precisely positioning a flying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by passive radio frequency (RF) measurements are being troubled by the extreme non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments, we propose a 3D joint time difference of arrival (TDOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) NLOS localization method for flying UAVs using three receivers. Compared with the existing positioning schemes based on the received signal strength (RSS), TDOA, time of arrival (TOA), and AOA methods, the advantage of the proposed method is that we do not need many receivers or priori NLOS statistics, which significantly decreases the cost in practice. Simulation results demonstrate that the positioning mean square error (MSE) of the proposed method is closer to the Cramer-Rao lower bound of TDOA-based method than the existing positioning methods. Moreover, the simulation results verified the reliability of the proposed method.