Rigidity-Based Multi-UAV Trajectory Optimization for Rapid Cooperative Emergency Target Localization

Abstract

Reducing the response time for accurate emergency-caller localization is critical in vehicular and public-safety networks. Although mobile devices commonly use GNSS, Wi-Fi, or cellular positioning, their accuracy and availability can degrade because of poor signal reception, limited infrastructure, and regulatory constraints. UAV-based localization offers a promising alternative by using airborne sensors to cooperatively estimate the target position. However, existing Fisher information matrix (FIM)-based trajectory optimization methods depend on the current target estimate and can perform poorly in the early mission stage, when measurements are limited and uncertainty is high. We propose a rigidity-based UAV trajectory optimization method that maximizes the smallest nonzero singular value of the rigidity matrix associated with the UAV-target sensing graph, improving geometric conditioning and reducing position ambiguity. We also introduce a pruning-based matrix reduction strategy for efficient real-time implementation. Simulations show that the proposed method reduces search time by 32.9% compared with FIM-based methods and satisfies the FCC horizontal emergency-localization requirement sooner. Further results demonstrate scalability, robustness to UAV positioning errors and NLOS path loss, low sensitivity to heading parameters, practical computation and communication costs, and more stable degradation than PPO-based baselines under severe sensing and navigation perturbations.