Abstract: In order to overcome the disadvantage of high sidelobes caused by different orientations of the antenna elements, a transmit waveform design method for the conformal multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar based on virtual aperture projection is proposed,taking the circular array as an example. Firstly, on the basis of accurate modeling of each element, a regular virtual array is obtained by virtual projection of the conformal array; secondly, the waveform design problem is transformed into the rank minimization problem of the transmit waveform covariance matrix by vectorising the transmit signal matrix. Finally, by using the log det heuristic algorithm, a convex model for the waveform design of the virtual array is established, which can be solved effectively by the convex toolbox. The simulation results show that compared with the existing methods,this method can design a lower side lobe transmit waveform for conformal MIMO radar.

Key words: conformal array, multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar, transmit waveform design, rank minimization