A Micro-Doppler Analysis for Radar-Based UAV Swarm Detection

In recent years, with the continuous development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) manufacturing and cluster control technology, UAV swarms have gradually penetrated the civil and military fields, and their large-scale application has put forward new requirements for the detection technology of UAV clusters. As the radar cross-section of a single UAV is usually small, time-frequency features are usually applied to radar-based UAV detections. In this paper, a method is proposed to utilize the micro-Doppler information generated by the mutual motion of UAVs within a UAV swarm for the determination of UAV clusters and single UAVs. By receiving the echoes generated by the UAV swarm and obtaining the time-frequency map after matched filtering and Short Time Fourier Transformation (STFT) in the corresponding slow time dimension, the micro-Doppler effect generated by the micro-motion inside the UAV swarm can be extracted. Finally, the feasibility of this method is verified by signal simulation on the echoes of UAV swarms.