A Motion Information Acquisition Algorithm of Multiantenna SAR Installed on Flexible and Discontinuous Structure Based on Distributed POS

Abstract

Airborne multi-antenna SAR urgently needs the high-precision motion information of each antenna to realize high-precision imaging. Distributed Position and Orientation System (POS) is an important way to solve this problem based on transfer alignment. Because multiple antennas are usually installed on the flexible and discontinuous structure, there are complex and time-varying relative motions between different antennas. This relative motion will lead to the decline of transfer alignment accuracy, and directly affects the imaging accuracy of SAR. To solve this problem, a motion information acquisition algorithm of multi-antenna SAR installed on flexible and discontinuous structure based on distributed POS is given. Firstly, the gyroscopes and accelerometers of the distributed POS are used to calculate the relative attitude between nodes, which is applicable to both continuous and discontinuous structure. Secondly, combining the smooth estimation and the distributed filter, a distributed smoothing algorithm including forward filter and backward smoothing is proposed to calculate the high-precision and smoothed motion data of each sub-node. The forward filter obtains the motion parameters of each sub-node through transfer alignment based on the above relative attitude data. The backward smoothing further improves the motion information accuracy of sub-node by using the measurement data at all time and sharing the data of all nodes. Through the flight imaging test of multi-antenna SAR installed on a flexible and discontinuous platform, it is shown that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the accuracy of the sub-node motion data, in which the errors of position, velocity and attitude are reduced by 58.9%, 61.9% and 71.2% respectively. Based on this motion data, SAR achieves better imaging focusing effect.