Receding Horizon Trajectory Optimization for Simultaneous Signal Landscape Mapping and Receiver Localization

A receiver with no a priori knowledge about its own states is dropped in an unknown environment comprising multiple signals of opportunity (SOPs) transmitters. Assuming that the receiver could control its maneuvers in the form of acceleration commands, two problems are considered. First, the minimal conditions under which such environment is completely observable are established. It is shown that receiver-controlled maneuvers reduce the minimal required a priori information about the environment for complete observability. Second, the trajectories that the receiver should traverse in order to build a highfidelity signal landscape map of the environment, while simultaneously localizing itself within this map in space and time with high accuracy are prescribed. To this end, the one-step look-ahead (greedy) strategy is compared to the multi-step look-ahead (receding horizon) strategy. The limitations and achieved improvements in the map quality and localization accuracy due to the receding horizon strategy are quantified, and the associated computational burden is discussed.