Multi-rotor Drone Micro-Doppler Simulation Incorporating Genuine Motor Speeds and Validation with L-band Staring Radar

In this paper, three simple models of a multi-rotor drone's timeseries radar returns were derived, and by populating the equation parameters with genuine drone motor speed recordings, a synthetic spectrogram was generated that accurately captures the characteristic uDoppler sidebands caused by the rapidly rotating propeller blades. Deficiencies in the model's amplitude modulation were identified and phenomenologically treated. The synthetic drone data was injected into a real radar background enabling a direct comparison of synthetic and real spectrograms of rotary-wing drones with an L-band staring radar.