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

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 the received signal strength indicator (RSSI). Fusion center will determine the location of the target via UAV triangulation. Different with the 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 rather 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.