AOA Pseudolinear Target Motion Analysis in the Presence of Sensor Location Errors

This paper presents new pseudolinear estimation algorithms for angle-of-arrival (AOA) target motion analysis when the sensor locations are not precisely known. Sensor location errors can cause significant performance degradation for the existing pseudolinear estimator (PLE) and its variants. In particular, we analytically show that, in the presence of sensor location errors, the well-known weighted instrumental variable estimator (WIVE) is no longer asymptotically unbiased due to the non-vanishing correlation between the instrumental variable matrix and the pseudolinear noise vector. To ameliorate this bias problem, a novel bias compensation method is developed for the WIVE, which is proven to be approximately efficient for a large number of measurements under the small noise assumption. In addition, a selective-angle-measurement (SAM) strategy is integrated into the bias-compensated WIVE (BCWIVE) to strengthen the correlation between the instrumental variable matrix and the measurement matrix, alleviating the performance degradation in large AOA and sensor location noises, and unfavourable geometries. The performance advantages of the proposed BCWIVE and SAM-BCWIVE over the PLE, its WIVE variants and the maximum likelihood estimator are demonstrated by way of extensive simulation examples.