Sensor cooperative scheduling method for low-altitude maneuvering target tracking in complex environment

Purpose Continuous and stable tracking of the low-altitude maneuvering targets is usually difficult due to terrain occlusion and Doppler blind zone (DBZ). This paper aims to present a non-myopic scheduling method of multiple radar sensors for tracking the low-altitude maneuvering targets. In this scheduling problem, the best sensors are systematically selected to observe targets for getting the best tracking accuracy under maintaining the low intercepted probability of a multi-sensor system. Design/methodology/approach First, the sensor scheduling process is formulated within the partially observable Markov decision process framework. Second, the interacting multiple model algorithm and the cubature Kalman filter algorithm are combined to estimate the target state, and the DBZ information is applied to estimate the target state when the measurement information is missing. Then, an approximate method based on a cubature sampling strategy is put forward to calculate the future expected objective of the multi-step scheduling process. Furthermore, an improved quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm is presented to solve the sensor scheduling action quickly. Optimization problem, an improved QPSO algorithm is presented to solve the sensor scheduling action quickly. Findings Compared with the traditional scheduling methods, the proposed method can maintain higher target tracking accuracy with a low intercepted probability. And the proposed target state estimation method in DBZ has better tracking performance. Originality/value In this paper, DBZ, sensor intercepted probability and complex terrain environment are considered in sensor scheduling, which has good practical application in a complex environment.