Volterra Series Synthesis of Nonlinear Stochastic Tracking Systems

One of the most important objectives of a radar angle-tracking loop is to keep the target within the beamwidth of the radar antenna. Thus, the behavior of the antenna pointing error is of vital interest in determination of tracking performance. For a tracker with a general polynomial linearity (representing nonlinear receiver characteristics), subjected to constant line-of-sight rate inputs, random initial antenna pointing errors, and white Gaussian receiver noise, a method to obtain approximations to the transient mean and variance of the antenna pointing error as explicit functions of time is presented.