Underdetermined direction of arrival estimation with nonuniform linear motion sampling based on a small unmanned aerial vehicle platform

Uniform linear array(ULA)radars are widely used in the collision-avoidance radar systems of small unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs).In practice,a ULA's multi-target direction of arrival(DOA)estimation performance suffers from significant performance degradation owing to the limited number of physical elements.To improve the underdetermined DOA estimation performance of a ULA radar mounted on a small UAV platform,we propose a nonuniform linear motion sampling underdetermined DOA estimation method.Using the motion of the UAV platform,the echo signal is sampled at different positions.Then,according to the concept of difference co-array,a virtual ULA with multiple array elements and a large aperture is synthesized to increase the degrees of freedom(DOFs).Through position analysis of the original and motion arrays,we propose a nonuniform linear motion sampling method based on ULA for determining the optimal DOFs.Under the condition of no increase in the aperture of the physical array,the proposed method obtains a high DOF with fewer sampling runs and greatly improves the underdetermined DOA estimation performance of ULA.The results of numerical simulations conducted herein verify the superior performance of the proposed method.