An efficient algorithm to compute the RCS of UAV swarmbased on spherical harmonic transform

ABSTRACT

It is time-consuming to simulate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm by the Multi-Level Fast Multipole Algorithm (MLFMA). This paper proposes a method to accelerate the simulation by neglecting the coupling among UAVs and computing the scattered field by Spherical Harmonic Transform (SHT). The key point is evaluating the scattered electric field of a UAV on an eccentric sphere by changing the order of summation of the spherical harmonics and then accelerating the summation by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). The example of a swarm of 6 UAVs shows that the bistatic Radar Cross Section (RCS) obtained by the proposed method is in good agreement with the RCS obtained by MLFMA, and the proposed method requires 4.76 times less memory and is 10.93 times faster than MLFMA.

KEYWORDS:

• Spherical harmonic transform
• UAV swarm
• radar cross section
• Fast Fourier Transform

Data availability

Regarding the raw data of the far-field RCS used in the fourth chapter of the paper, I have explained the website at https://figshare.com/s/df680dd779f1939f3ae6, doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.13251407. These data is the data contains a total of four pictures, they are Figure 7, Figure 9, Figure 11, Figure 13.

UAV data and current procedures cannot be shared at this time, because these data also form part of ongoing research.

Disclosure statement

Authors have no conflict of interest to declare

Funding

This work was sponsored by the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (No.2021JM-129).