Multifunctional reconfigurable antennas for cognitive radars

Cognitive radar systems offer improved performance through mimicking the perception-action cycle in human cognition. While most of the efforts in the area to-date focus on agile waveform design and sensor management, in this paper, we propose adaptive control of novel multifunctional reconfigurable antennas (MRAs) as a mechanism for action within the cognitive radar framework. Reconfigurable parasitic layer based MRAs have the capability of dynamically and simultaneously changing its electromagnetic characteristics (mode of operation), e.g. antenna beam pattern, polarization, center frequency, or a combination of thereof. In this work, a designed and fabricated reconfigurable parasitic layer based MRA is presented. A computationally efficient mode selection scheme is proposed to adaptively select the modes of the MRA for a defined cost such as improved SNR or lower Cramer Rao Bound. A cognitive target tracking framework is proposed through MRA mode selection for cognitive radars. Initial results show that MRAs with mode selection provides enhanced direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation and cognitive target tracking performance.