RF Emitter Location Using a Network of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs)

Abstract

In this paper, we design a network of small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) for passive location of RF emitters. Each small UAV is equipped with multiple electronic surveillance (ES) sensors to provide local mean distance estimation based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI). Fusion center will determine the location of the target through UAV triangulation. Different with previous existing studies, our method is on a basis of an empirical path loss and log-normal shadowing model, from a wireless communication and signal processing vision to offer an effective solution. The performance degradation between UAVs and fusion center is taken into consideration other than assuming lossless communication. We analyze the geolocation error and the error probability of distance based on the proposed system. The result shows that this approach provides robust performance for high frequency RF emitters.