Radar backscattering modelling and micro‐motion parameter estimation method for quadcopter

Abstract

Abstract Due to the high‐speed rotors and overlapped propellers, it is still a challenge to extract the micro‐motion parameters of the quadcopter. In this work, the authors establish a radar backscattering model of the quadcopter based on the flight control theory and radar backscattering characteristics. Then, the improved template matching method and peak grouping method are proposed to capture the periodic information for overlapped propellers on a range‐time profile and extract the rotation speeds of rotors. By simulating the nine types of quadcopter movements, the relative error of the rotation speeds is estimated to be lower than 1.4% for each rotor with a signal‐to‐noise ratio of 15 dB.

Keywords

• radar signal processing
• image matching
• backscatter
• aircraft control
• remote sensing by radar
• radar target recognition