Joint Position–Orientation Deployment Design of UAV-Borne Linear-Array Angle-of-Arrival Sensors for Target UAV Localization

This paper investigates joint deployment of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne linear-array angle-of-arrival (AOA) sensors for localizing a target UAV in three-dimensional space. Since each sensing UAV carries a lightweight one-dimensional (1-D) AOA array, each measurement provides only one angular constraint, and its information contribution depends jointly on the UAV waypoint and array pointing direction. This leads to a coupled coordinate–orientation design problem that differs from conventional full-AOA deployment. We formulate a Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB)-based framework under A- and D-optimality criteria, covering both free-flight and constrained hovering regions. By exploiting the structure of the 1-D AOA Fisher information matrix, we show that, for fixed UAV coordinates, the orientation block can be exactly eliminated through a low-dimensional eigenproblem. The resulting reduced coordinate problem is then solved by a geometry-structured sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method, whose curvature model captures the radial and tangential sensitivities induced by line-of-sight geometry. Numerical simulations further validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.