Least-absolute-deviations position finding

Position finding has historically been carried out by calculating the coordinates of the mean position via a least-squares procedure based on the distance of the position from several direction lines. It has been suggested that the least-squares procedure assigns too much weight to outliers among the set of direction lines, outliers which may actually be associated with objects other than the one being located. In this paper, a method of using least-absolute deviations, which yields a more outlier-resistant median estimate of the position instead of the least-squares mean estimate, is presented.