Impact of Position Errors on Synthetic Aperture DOA Convergence Based on Swarming UAV s

This paper reports on the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using micro-UAV swarm-based (MUSB) arrays in the presence of location errors. The MUSB array is a virtually three-dimensional (3-D) random time-varying array reconstructed from swarming UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle). In practice, the sensor position errors cannot be omitted and will impact the DOA estimation performance. The goal of this work is to evaluate the impact of the position errors in the proposed MUSB array and study the convergence under low snapshot conditions using the iterative Multiple Signal Classification (iterative- MUSIC) algorithm. Measurements on a thirty location test platform are provided to benchmark the performance with expectations.