<title>Sensor data fusion of radar, ESM, IFF, and data LINK of the Canadian Patrol Frigate and the data alignment issues</title>

Abstract

The research and development group at Loral Canada is now at the second phase of the development of a data fusion demonstration model (DFDM) for a naval anti-air warfare to be used as a workbench tool to perform exploratory research. This project has emphatically addressed how the concepts related to fusion could be implemented within the Canadian Patrol Frigate (CPF) software environment. The project has been designed to read data passively on the CPF bus without any modification to the CPF software. This has brought to light important time alignment issues since the CPF sensors and the CPF command and control system were not important time alignment issues since the CPF sensors and the CPF command and control system were not originally designed to support a track management function which fuses information. The fusion of data from non-organic sensors with the tactical Link-11 data has produced stimulating spatial alignment problems which have been overcome by the use of a geodetic referencing coordinate system. Some benchmark scenarios have been selected to quantitatively demonstrate the capabilities of this fusion implementation. This paper describes the implementation design of DFDM (version 2), and summarizes the results obtained so far when fusing the scenarios simulated data.