A simple signal source localization system is described and the preliminary field test results are presented. The system consists of an equipment in an aerial vehicle and a localization station on the ground. The on-board equipment in the aerial vehicle measures Direction of Arrival (DoA) of the signal at distributed positions on its flight route using a uniform linear antenna array and transmits them to the localization station together with its position and posture data obtained by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) sensors. The localization station then estimates the signal source position through a set of linear and nonlinear signal processing such as sample-equivalent normalization, spurious noise suppression for DoA estimates, and incremental localization. The results are further refined by post-processing to yield highly accurate estimation. Finally, the field test is performed in small scale but it can be expanded to any scale. The method to estimate the expected accuracy for the expanded scale is provided.

Keywords: localization, unmanned aerial vehicle, global navigation satellite system, direction of arrival