The estimation of the positioning accuracy of the earth surface located emitters by unmanned aerial vehicles

The ability to directly occupancy and flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) above the earth\'s surface causes their application for solving problems of search and detection of missing emergency lights. The minimum accuracy of existing passive methods of deter-mining the coordinates of radio sources (RS) provides time difference of arrival positioning method. The article presents the expression to calculate the errors of positioning covariance matrix of the errors. It shown that the error of positioning depends only on the coordinates of collection points and RS.

Based on the covariance matrix of the errors of the conducted investigation of the error positioning RS, located on the surface of the earth, a group of UAVs. The obtained results of the error of positioning and the dilution of precision at different geometry of positional relationship UAVs. It shown that to ensure a minimum of error positioning the RS at the earth\'s surface necessary to place the UAVs in the wireframe tetrahedron, and the maximum the dilution of precision to set the base between the UAVs corresponding to the size of the search area of RS.