Active Target Tracking Using Bearing-only Measurements With Gaussian Process Learning

Abstract: This paper studies the tracking problem of a target with the partially unknown motion model by an active agent with bearing-only measurements using Gaussian process learning. To address this problem, a learning-planning-control framework is proposed. First, to learn and predict the target motion under mild assumptions, a Gaussian-process-based scheme is proposed, and a probabilistic uniform prediction error bound can be rigorously proved. Second, by analyzing the data dependence of the posterior covariance, we obtain an optimal relative trajectory to achieve efficient sampling. Third, to realize efficient learning, a controller to track the planned path is proposed based on the learned target motion, which can provide guaranteed tracking performance. Theoretical analysis is conducted to prove the the given probabilistic error bounds. Numerical examples and comparison with other typical methods verify the feasibility and superior performance of our proposed framework.