Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2022, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (2): 480-489.doi: 10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2022.02.16

• Sensors and Signal Processing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Resolving range ambiguity for cooperative detection using UAV swarms

Xingjia YANG1, Keqing DUAN1,*, Xiang LI1, Wei QI2   

  1. 1. School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
    2. Air Force Early Warning Academy, Wuhan 430019, China
  • Received:2021-01-15 Online:2022-02-18 Published:2022-02-24
  • Contact: Keqing DUAN

Abstract:

Compared with traditional monostatic airborne radar, distributed cooperative detection using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms has many advantages such as wider detection range, higher detection accuracy and more flexible array arrangement. Consequently, it is one of the important directions for the development of airborne warning radar systems in the future. As UAV swarms radar array has a large size and ultra-sparse aperture, its echo is approximately spherical and has the strong near-field effect. In this paper, the space-time signal model of UAV swarms sparse array under the near-field condition is firstly derived. Then a novel method for resolving range ambiguity is proposed, which is based on the near-field characteristics of the target echo. For each range bin, the proposed method calculates multiple space-time weight coefficients for clutter suppression and target matching, in which the difference of the target echoes within different ambiguous ranges is utilized. And the actual range ambiguous number of the target can be resolved via comparing the target power of all the filtering results. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm, cooperative detection, space-time adaptive processing (STAP), near-field effect, resolving range ambiguity

CLC Number: 

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