Folker Hoffmann, Matthew Ritchie, Francesco Fioranelli, Alexander Charlish, Hugh Griffiths

Bottom Line Up Front

I rate this 7.9.

Super cool experiment, I’m frankly shocked that it works as well as it did. I wish I had radars to play with, and results from slightly less cooperative UAVs. Clearly lots of opportunities for ’next steps’ with this exact hardware setup. I want one.

Figure Anarchy

I know LaTeX and maybe even IEEE insist on letting figures roam the countryside however they please, but good lord, this paper is just a description of figures and none of them are anywhere near the text describing them. 4 of them (called 2 figures, because 1 label applies to multiple figures for maximum confusion) are half way through a page with nothing else other than citations on it. Also raster figures that are just lines and text so I can’t even zoom. Minus 1 point just for this madness.

Summary

Intro

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Very scary. We can’t get experimental data from multistatic radar systems. First experimental validation of multistatic tracking of a UAV using micro doppler for clutter surpression.

NetRAD system is used for experimental trials.

NetRAD

3 identical separate nodes

  • 2.4GHz.
  • Linear up-chirp modulation with 45MHz bandwidth,
  • 0.6 microseconds pulse duration,
  • 23dBm transmitted power,
  • 5kHz Pulse Repetition Frequency.
  • (Whole UAV micro-Doppler signature is included in unambiguous region)
  • Horizontally polarized antennas with 10 degrees beam-width in elevation and azimuth, and;
  • 24dBi gain.

Drone

Drone is a DJI Phantom Vision 2+. Ground truth comes from GPS.

Constant False Alarm Rate Detector

Trees cause noise in the 100m bins. Ignore it.

Micro-Doppler Discrimination

UAV can rapidly change velocity and also hover, making it difficult to separate from cluttrer based on Doppler shift alone. Micro-Doppler means it isn’t lost with lower radial velocity.

UAV Tracking

Extended Kalman Filter. 4 degrees of freedom drone, just a 2d Cartesian vector. Wow, UAV process noise is taken as 100m^2/s^3. I’m surprised this works. Nothing else remarkable, but certainly nothing that feels as oddly specific as I was expecting, quite general.

Results

They fly right along the beam, but have very impressive tracking.

Discussion and Extensions

  • Keeping UAV in the cross of two beams is tricky.
  • Multiple tragets
  • 3d instead of 2d

Conclusion

Despite no angular info, high quality tracks.