Abstract：The acoustic emission(AE) 3D location is widely used in rock mechanics experiments，and one of its main disadvantages of the current technique is the low accuracy of general algorithms. It is realized that the random error is the dominating factor which influences the accuracy of AE location the most based on an analysis of many algorithms and a check with an artificial AE shock excitation. Therefore，least absolute deviation，which is more robust than least squares especially for Gaussian noise，is selected to reduce the random error. Experimental results show that compared with least squares，least absolute deviation can improve location accuracy effectively considering the existence of several outliers.
