Objective In recent years, applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have experienced rapid growth in both military and civilian domains, including aerial surveillance, remote sensing, and search and rescue. Beyond individual use, UAV swarms are widely employed as micro-UAV array radars. High-precision detection is achieved through beamforming by treating a swarm as a large movable antenna aperture. Therefore, high-precision flight control becomes essential. However, outdoor formations often rely on relative position-based strategies to avoid GPS inaccuracies. Although this approach remains theoretically feasible, micro-UAVs can deviate because of turbulence, and positional errors can be inherited by subsequent UAVs, leading to significant degradation in detection performance. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the impact of such inherent positional perturbations on the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation performance. Methods This study focused on the lower bound of estimation accuracy to assess the efficiency and precision of estimators in the presence of calibration errors. Because the analytical calculation of the Cramér‒Rao bound (CRB) with random nuisance parameters was challenging, the hybrid Cramér‒Rao bound (HCRB) was adopted, as it represented an effective balance between computability and tightness. Based on the assumption of the inheritability of UAV array perturbations, the HCRB was derived for the DoA of a single unknown source. A swarm of N UAVs was considered as a uniform linear array, where each UAV carried an omnidirectional antenna. The model jointly analyzed perturbations in the parallel and perpendicular directions to the aperture under a far-field narrowband signal scenario. In addition, numerical simulations and Monte Carlo experiments based on the matched filter (MF) estimator were conducted to validate the theoretical derivation. Results and Discussions Numerical simulations analyzed the HCRB performance under various influencing factors. The results demonstrated that as the positional perturbation variance increases, the HCRB for both low and high SNR cases increases from the CRB level without interference, confirming that the error-free CRB represents the lower bound of the HCRB. Monte Carlo experiments exhibited trends consistent with these theoretical results. In addition, as the SNR increases, the HCRB of DoA becomes more sensitive to positional errors. Although the HCRB decreases with higher SNR, smaller positional variance consistently produces lower HCRB values. Regarding the number of UAVs, although the HCRB monotonically decreases as N increases from 1 to 128, it did not converge to the CRB without perturbations. Finally, the impact of different DoA angles indicated that the HCRB is non-uniform and axially symmetric, achieving its lowest value at 0° and increasing as the absolute value of the DoA increases. Conclusions The inherent nature of positional errors arising from relative position-based formations, which has been overlooked in previous literature, significantly affects UAV array performance. The derivation and quantitative analysis of the HCRB in this study confirm that the inheritability of perturbations leads to a performance floor that cannot be eliminated simply by increasing the SNR or the number of UAVs. These findings provide an important theoretical basis for assessing efficiency and predicting the performance of mobile array radars in practical flight environments, particularly for applications such as interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR).
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