Robust Aircraft Positioning using Signals of Opportunity with Direction of Arrival

Abstract: This thesis considers the problem of using signals of opportunity (SOO) with known direction of arrival (DOA) for aircraft positioning. SOO is a collective name for a wide range of signals not intended for navigation but which can be intercepted by the radar warning system on an aircraft. These signals can for example aid an unassisted inertial navigation system (INS) in areas where the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is inaccessible. Challenges arise as the signals are transmitted from non-controllable sources without any guarantee of quality and availability. Hence, it is important that any estimation method utilising SOO is robust and statistically consistent in case of time-varying signals of different quality, missed detections and unreliable signals such as outliers. The problem is studied using SOO sources with either known or unknown locations. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) based solution is proposed for the first case which is shown to significantly improve the localisation performance compared to an unassisted INS in common scenarios. Yet, a number of factors affect this performance, including the measurement noise variance, the signal rate and the availability of known source locations. An outlier rejection mechanism is developed which is shown to increase the robustness of the suggested method. A numerical evaluation indicates that statistical consistency can be maintained in many situations even with the above-mentioned challenges. An EKF based simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) solution is proposed for the case with unknown SOO source locations. The flight trajectory and initialisation process of new SOO sources are critical in this case. A method based on nonlinear least squares is proposed for the initialisation process, where new SOO sources are only allowed to be initialised in the filter once a set of requirements are fulfilled. This method has shown to increase the robustness during initialisation, when the outlier rejection is not applicable. When combining known and unknown SOO source locations, a more stable localisation solution is obtained compared to when all locations are unknown. Applicability of the proposed solution is verified by a numerical evaluation. The computational time increases cubically with the number of sources in the state and quadratically with the number of measurements. The time is substantially increased during landmark initialisation.