Radar Tracking from an Airborne Platform with Randomly Varying Orientations

Abstract

The theory of Kalman Tracking from an airborne platform with known orientations (pitch, roll & yaw) is extended to cover the cases of either unknown random orientations or orientations measured with random errors. The degradation in the tracker performance due to these effects is estimated and the augmentation of the noise covariance matrix required to reduce the degradation is derived, and verified with simulations.

Indexing terms:

• Radar tracking
• Airborne platform
• Random orientations
• Performance degradation