Information theoretic approach to observer path design for bearings-only tracking

Abstract

Open-loop control strategies, via information theoretic criteria, for the design of optimal observer trajectories in the bearings-only tracking problem are presented. The aim is to obtain tight bounds on the location and velocity of a single target through own ship maneuvers. An information theoretic approach for stochastic observability is investigated in [7]. In this paper, optimal paths are derived by maximizing the mutual information between the measurement sequence and the final target state or the entire target trajectory. Optimization techniques, such as dynamic programming and enumeration with optimal pruning are derived.