Exploration on 2D DOA Estimation of Linear Array Motion: Uniform Linear Motion

Generally, due to the limitation of the dimension of the array aperture, linear arrays can-not achieve two-dimensional (2D) direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. But the emergence of array motion provides a chance for that. In this paper, a general-ized motion scheme and a novel method of 2D DOA estimation are proposed by exploring the linear array motion. To be specific, the linear arrays are controlled to move along an arbitrary direction at a constant ve-locity and snap per fixed time delay. All the received signals are processed to synthesize the comprehensive observation vector for an extended 2D virtual aper-ture. Subsequently, since most of 2D DOA estima-tion methods are not universal to our proposed motion scheme and the reduced-dimensional (RD) method fails to handle the case of the coupled parameters, a decoupled reduced-complexity multiple signals classi-fication (DRC MUSIC) algorithm is designed specifi-cally. Simulation results demonstrate that: a) our pro-posed scheme can achieve underdetermined 2D DOA estimation just by the linear arrays; b) our designed DRC MUSIC algorithm has the good properties of high accuracy and low complexity; c) our proposed motion scheme with the DRC method has better uni-versality in the motion direction.