Analysis of Mobile 3-D Radar Error Registration when Radar Sways with Platform

Abstract

For mobile radars installed on a gyro-stabilised platform (GSP) that can steadily follow an East-North-Up (ENU) frame, attitude biases (ABs) of the platform and offset biases (OBs) of the radar are linear dependent variables. Therefore ABs and OBs are unobservable in the linearized registration equations; however, when combining them as new variables, the system becomes observable, and this model has been called the unified registration model (URM). Unlike GSP mobile radars, un-stabilised GSP (or UGSP) mobile radars are installed on the platform directly and rotate with the platform simultaneously. For UGSP, it is testified that both types of biases are independent and observable because the time-varying attitude angles (AAs)1 of the platform are included in the registration equations, which destroy the dependencies of both kinds of biases and lead us to propose a completely different linearized registration model– the All Augmented Model (AAM). AAM employs all OBs and ABs in the state vector and a Kalman filter (KF) to produce their estimates. Numerical simulation results show that the estimated performance of AAM is close to the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and that the Root Mean Square Errors (RMSEs) of the rectified measurements by using AAM are more than 500 m smaller than by URM in all directions.