Non-linear Observer Design for Bearing-only Target Motion Analysis

This paper addresses the problem of designing non-linear observers for bearing-only target motion analysis (BOTMA). For the case where a source and target agent are navigating in a plane, we design non-linear state observers to estimate the target’s trajectory using only noisy bearing measurements collected by the source. Considering linear relative dynamics for the mobile agents and non-linear relative bearing measurements, the observer gains are designed by solving a set of time-varying linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions. Compared to existing filters in the stochastic framework used to solve the BOTMA problem, the proposed non-linear observer provides guarantees based on the Lyapunov stability criterion. The effectiveness of the proposed observer for target state estimation is demonstrated through numerical simulations and comparison with extended Kalman filter.