Efficient closed‐form estimator for joint elliptic and hyperbolic localisation in multistatic system

The target localisation problem is considered by the use of hybrid bistatic range (BR) and time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements in multistatic localisation system. The BR and TDOA define an ellipse and a hyperbola, respectively, and the target resides on the intersections of several such quadratic curves. An efficient closed‐form solution to this non‐linear estimation problem is developed by employing two‐step weighted least squares minimisations. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reach the Cramer–Rao lower bound accuracy for small Gaussian measurement noise. A real experiment is presented to validate the performance of the proposed estimator in an acoustic array system.