Dynamic Configuration of Time-Varying Waveforms for Agile Sensing and Tracking in Clutter

The advent of waveform-agile sensors has enabled the design of tracking systems where the transmitted waveform is changed on-the-fly in response to the tracker's requirements. This approach can provide performance improvements over individual optimization of the sensor waveform or the tracking algorithm. In this paper, we consider joint sensor configuration and tracking for the problem of tracking a single target in the presence of clutter using range and range-rate measurements obtained by waveform-agile, active sensors in a narrowband environment. We propose an algorithm to select and configure linear and nonlinear frequency-modulated waveforms to minimize the predicted mean square error (MSE) in the target state estimate; the MSE is predicted using the Cramer-Rao lower bound on the measurement error in conjunction with the unscented transform. We further extend our algorithm to match wideband environments, and we demonstrate the algorithm performance through a Monte Carlo simulation of a radar tracking example.

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