A Bearing-Strength Method for Motion Estimation of Unknown Energy Emitters

2026-07-14

AI Summary

This work addresses the inherent limitation of conventional bearing-only methods, which rely on sensor lateral motion to ensure observability and thus face practical deployment constraints. To overcome this, the paper proposes a novel passive motion state estimation approach that fuses bearing measurements with received signal strength (RSS) information. By systematically leveraging RSS—a readily available yet long-overlooked modality—the method substantially enhances system observability and entirely eliminates the dependence on lateral sensor motion. Through rigorous observability analysis and nonlinear state estimation techniques, the proposed framework achieves accurate estimation of an unknown emitter’s motion state without requiring additional hardware. Experimental validation using real-world data confirms the efficacy and practicality of the approach.

Abstract

This paper studies motion estimation of moving energy emitters using passive sensors. The emitters may be light, acoustic, or radio sources. While the bearing vector pointing from the sensor to the emitter can be easily obtained, existing approaches mainly rely on the bearing-only motion estimation method. However, this method suffers from a fundamental limitation that the sensor must have lateral motion to ensure observability. Unfortunately, this lateral motion requirement often conflicts with the sensor's desired motion in many tasks. In this paper, we point out that the received signal strength, which can also be obtained easily in many ways, can greatly enhance motion estimation. Surprisingly, this strength information has not been well explored so far. Here, we propose a new bearing-strength method to fully exploit both the bearing and strength measurements. Our theoretical analysis shows that the system observability is significantly enhanced in the sense that the lateral motion condition is not required anymore. Real-world experimental results verify the proposed method and the theoretical analysis. It is notable that the benefit of the proposed method comes with no additional cost since it simply utilizes the received strength information that has not been fully exploited in the past.

Problem

• motion estimation
• energy emitters
• bearing-only
• observability
• received signal strength

Innovation

• bearing-strength method
• motion estimation
• signal strength
• observability
• passive sensing