Emerging Trends in Radar: Metacognitive Radar Networks for the Next Generation of Intelligent Sensing

This article highlights the emerging area of metacognitive radar. The metacognitive radar uses models that leverage concepts from human learning to form an outer feedback and control loop for cognitive radar. Thus, metacognitive radar monitors the performance of cognitive radar through an exploration and exploitation reinforcement learning process. This article provides an overview of cognitive and metacognitive radar systems, along with a discussion of sensor development for spectrum sharing due to its strong role in many cognitive radar system designs. Metacognition for network radar is also discussed in the context of game theory and network reinforcement learning. Elements of a proposed metacognitive radar network are introduced, and several future research challenges are discussed.