Development of a generic multi-sensor tracking system for agile radars

Abstract

The paper details the recent development of a generic tracking system within the Maritime Weapon Systems Integration team at QinetiQ Portsdown West. The tracker has been used to process multiple colocated radars, remote airborne radars and simulated plots. It has also been integrated with an open loop tracking simulation using a high quality radar simulator. The paper highlights some of the problems, and our proposed solutions, when an entire system was developed from scratch. Compared to a 'textbook' implementation (Blackman, S. and Popoli, R., Design and Analysis of Modern Tracking Systems, Artech House, 1999) we have made only small theoretical developments; it is hoped that our work may be of interest to those faced with the practical problems of integrating techniques into a real system for real data. The motivation for the project is that scan based systems are unable to process data from agile radar and are generally unsuitable for phased-array radar systems. A further requirement is that multiple disparate sensors are in service and a development system was required for integration studies. The project is expected to form a central part of QinetiQ's ongoing research into netted sensor applications.