Bearing-Only Target Motion Analysis

The main goal of the bearing-only target motion analysis (BOTMA) is to determine the target's kinematic parameters such as position, course, and speed by only using the bearings reported by an onboard passive sensor (e.g., a sonar or an ESM [electronic support measures] device). This chapter provides a brief description of the BOTMA problem. Next, it discusses the implementation of the Kalman filtering technique to solve the problem. The authors then discuss the variations of the Kalman filtering (i.e., the extended and unscented Kalman filters). They also propose a genetic algorithm metaheuristic that incorporates a novel search space narrowing technique to solve the BOTMA problem and present numerical results for different noise conditions. They finally highlight the future research directions for modeling and solving the BOTMA problem.