Adaptive Beamforming for Target Detection and Surveillance Based on Distributed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platforms

A distributed sensor array network for target detection and surveillance is studied with sub-arrays placed on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms, where arbitrary locations and rotation angles are allocated to each UAV-based sub-array in the predefined Cartesian coordinate system. In this model, one transmitter sends out a single signal and it is then reflected back from the targets and received by the distributed sensor array system. A joint reference signal-based beamformer (JRSB) is proposed for the static/slowly moving targets and UAV platforms where the Doppler effects can be ignored, leading to improved performance by exploiting the information collected by all the sub-arrays simultaneously. Then, the developed beamformer is extended to the dynamic case considering the Doppler effects, referred to as the frequency extended JRSB (FE-JRSB), achieving the potential maximum output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) by exploiting the information across the potential frequencies of interest jointly. The output signal of the beamformer with increased SINR can be used to assist the extended target detection in the following processing. Simulation results show that both are able to extract the signals of interest while suppressing interfering signals, and a lower mean square error and a higher output SINR are achieved compared with a regular reference signal-based beamformer using a single sub-array. One unique feature of the provided solutions is that, although the signals involved are narrowband, the employed beamforming structure has to be wideband for it to be effective.