Adaptive two‐step bearing‐only underwater uncooperative target tracking with uncertain underwater disturbances

The bearing‐only tracking of an underwater uncooperative target can protect maritime territories and allows for the utilization of sea resources. Considering the influences of an unknown underwater environment, this work aimed to estimate 2‐D locations and velocities of an underwater target with uncertain underwater disturbances. In this paper, an adaptive two‐step bearing‐only underwater uncooperative target tracking filter (ATSF) for uncertain underwater disturbances is proposed. Considering the nonlinearities of the target’s kinematics and the bearing‐only measure-ments, in addition to the uncertain noise caused by an unknown underwater environment, the proposed ATSF consists of two major components, namely, an online noise estimator and a robust extended two‐step filter. First, using a modified Sage‐Husa online noise estimator, the uncertain process and measurement noise are estimated at each tracking step. Then, by adopting an extended state and by using a robust negative matrix‐correcting method in conjunction with a regularized Newton‐Gauss iteration scheme, the current state of the underwater uncooperative target is esti-mated. Finally, the proposed ATSF was tested via simulations of a 2‐D underwater uncooperative target tracking scenario. The Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrated the reliability and accu-racy of the proposed ATSF in bearing‐only underwater uncooperative tracking missions.