Tracking swarms of unmanned aerial systems

The proliferation of cheap Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) poses some significant challenges for the Ground Based Air Defence (GBAD) environment. Individual UAS are inherently difficult to detect, track, classify and identify, but the challenges are exacerbated if UAS are deployed in swarms. It can be appreciated that small physical size, combined with the extensive use of non-metallic materials, will render an individual UAS difficult to detect from a radar's perspective. If such targets are deployed in a group, then the radar response is likely to consist of intermittent, uncorrelated observations on random subsets of the swarm as a whole, with no guarantee that observations made on individual constituent UAS will be consistent from scan to scan. This paper describes a tracking filter model that is able to simultaneously track the swarm centroid and the spatialdispersion of constituent UAS,withoutrequiring any pre-processing of radarreturns into clusters.