Extended target radar measurement using UAV Toolbox

I am trying to create an extended target simulation to simulate drone tracking using radar. I am using the UAV Toolbox to simulate the drones, and the Radar toolbox with the provided ExampleHelperUAVRadar.m file referenced here. However, even when I set the detection mode to non-clustered, e.g.

radarSensor = radarDataGenerator("no scanning","SensorIndex",1,"UpdateRate",10, ...
    "TargetReportFormat","Detections");

the targets behave as points. This leads me to believe that the radar only sees point targets, ignoring UAV meshes.

Is there any way to assign Radar platform attributes to UAV platforms? Thank you very much, and if I omitted any useful information I apologize.

Answer 1

[Isha]

Hello,

Based on the current MathWorks documentation and the “Simulate Radar Sensor Mounted on UAV” example, the behavior you are observing is expected. In this workflow, the UAV mesh created with updateMesh is used for scenario visualization, while radarDataGenerator generates detections or tracks from target platform states. I could not find documentation stating that the UAV mesh is automatically converted into an extended radar target or that radar-specific platform attributes can be assigned directly to a uavPlatform for this purpose.

Simulate Radar Sensor Mounted on UAV - MATLAB & Simulink

radarDataGenerator - Generate radar detections or track reports - MATLAB

Also, setting:

"TargetReportFormat","Detections"

changes the output to detections (clustered or unclustered), but the documentation snippet does not indicate that this setting changes the target from a point-like platform representation to a mesh-based extended target.

Radar Data Generator - Generate radar sensor detections and tracks - Simulink

radarDataGenerator - Generate radar detections or track reports - MATLAB

So, from the sources I found, there does not appear to be a built-in way in this example workflow to make the radar automatically “see” the UAV mesh as an extended target. If you need extended-target behavior, a practical approach is to model the UAV as multiple scattering centers / multiple closely spaced targets. That idea is consistent with extended-target radar modeling based on scattering centers, although I did not find a MATLAB example in the returned sources that shows this as a direct built-in UAV Toolbox feature.

Hope this helps.