An Efficient Strategy for Accurate Detection and Localization of UAV Swarms

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms have shown great potential for Internet of Things. Meantime, its malicious use may cause huge threat to the national security. UAV swarms show the characteristic of high density which poses formidable challenges to radar resolution in the defense of critical areas. In this paper, we consider a radar equipped with coprime array, and then, use the coherent long-time integration (LTI) technique and gridless sparse technique to detect and localize UAVs in a swarm. This strategy takes full account of advantages of coprime array, coherent LTI technique and gridless sparse technique, i.e., i) the coprime array can provide a larger array aperture than the uniform linear array with the same number of array elements to relieve the stress of the gridless sparse technique; ii) the combination of coherent LTI technique and gridless sparse technique can maximize their advantages and make up for their shortcomings. By mathematical analyses and extensive numerical examples, we show the superiority of the proposed strategy in terms of accurate detection and localization of UAV swarms.