Underdetermined direction of arrival estimation with nonuniform linear motion sampling based on a small unmanned aerial vehicle platform

Uniform linear array(ULA)radars are widely used in the collision-avoidance radar systems of small unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs).In practice,a ULA's multi-target direction of arrival(DOA)estimation performance suffers from significant performance degradation owing to the limited number of physical elements.To improve the underdetermined DOA estimation performance of a ULA radar mounted on a small UAV platform,we propose a nonuniform linear motion sampling underdetermined DOA estimation method.Using the motion of the UAV platform,the echo signal is sampled at different positions.Then,according to the concept of difference co-array,a virtual ULA with multiple array elements and a large aperture is synthesized to increase the degrees of freedom(DOFs).Through position analysis of the original and motion arrays,we propose a nonuniform linear motion sampling method based on ULA for determining the optimal DOFs.Under the condition of no increase in the aperture of the physical array,the proposed method obtains a high DOF with fewer sampling runs and greatly improves the underdetermined DOA estimation performance of ULA.The results of numerical simulations conducted herein verify the superior performance of the proposed method.

Improved Capon Estimator for High-Resolution DOA Estimation and Its Statistical Analysis

Despite some efforts and attempts have been made to improve the direction-of-arrival(DOA)estimation performance of the standard Capon beamformer(SCB)in array processing,rigorous statistical performance analyses of these modified Capon estimators are still lacking.This paper studies an improved Capon estimator(ICE)for estimating the DOAs of multiple uncorrelated narrowband signals,where the higherorder inverse(sample)array covariance matrix is used in the Capon-like cost function.By establishing the relationship between this nonparametric estimator and the parametric and classic subspace-based MUSIC(multiple signal classification),it is clarified that as long as the power order of the inverse covariance matrix is increased to reduce the influence of signal subspace components in the ICE,the estimation performance of the ICE becomes equivalent to that of the MUSIC regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR).Furthermore the statistical performance of the ICE is analyzed,and the large-sample mean-squared-error(MSE)expression of the estimated DOA is derived.Finally the effectiveness and the theoretical analysis of the ICE are substantiated through numerical examples,where the Cramer-Rao lower bound(CRB)is used to evaluate the validity of the derived asymptotic MSE expression.

DIRECTION-OF-ARRIVAL ESTIMATION IN THE PRESENCE OF MUTUAL COUPLING BASED ON JOINT SPARSE RECOVERY

A novel Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation method is proposed in the presence of mutual coupling using the joint sparse recovery. In the proposed method, the eigenvector corresponding to the maximum eigenvalue of covariance matrix of array measurement is viewed as the signal to be represented. By exploiting the geometrical property in steering vectors and the symmetric Toeplitz structure of Mutual Coupling Matrix (MCM), the redundant dictionaries containing the DOA information are constructed. Consequently, the optimization model based on joint sparse recovery is built and then is solved through Second Order Cone Program (SOCP) and Interior Point Method (IPM). The DOA estimates are gotten according to the positions of nonzeros elements. At last, computer simulations demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed method.

Parameter Estimation of Multiple Frequency-Hopping Signals Based on Space-Time-Frequency Analysis by Atomic Norm Soft Thresholding with Missing Observations

In this paper,we address the problem of multiple frequency-hopping(FH)signal parameters estimation in the presence of random missing observations.A space-time matrix with random missing observations is acquired by a uniform linear array(ULA).We exploit the inherent incomplete data processing capability of atomic norm soft thresholding(AST)to analyze the space-time matrix and complete the accurate estimation of the hopping time and frequency of the received FH signals.The hopping time is obtained by the sudden changes of the spatial information,which is implemented as the boundary to divide the time domain signal so that each segment of the signal is a superposition of time-invariant multiple components.Then,the frequency of multiple signal components can be estimated precisely by AST within each segment.After obtaining the above two parameters of the hopping time and the frequency of signals,the direction of arrival(DOA)can be directly calculated by them,and the network sorting can be realized.Results of simulation show that the proposed method is superior to the existing technology.Even when a large portion of data observations is missing,as the number of array elements increases,the proposed method still achieves acceptable accuracy of multi-FH signal parameters estimation.

1D Acoustic Velocity-Independent DOA Estimation Method with Arbitrary Arrays

The performance of conventional direction of arrival(DOA)method is greatly affected by the uncertainty of wave velocity in underwater environment.To solve this problem,an acoustic velocity-independent method is proposed to estimate the underwater DOA using two arbitrary intersecting uniform linear arrays in this study.By introducing the additional array compared to the conventional DOA methods,the proposed algorithm can make its performance independent of the acoustic velocity through the geometric relationship between those two arrays.The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is more accurate and robust than other methods in an unknown sound velocity.