| The Department of Defense has identified a critical need
for rapid and accurate location of hostile radar emitters in
combat situations. As demonstrated during the first Gulf
War in 1991, these radars were used in “burst mode,”
remaining active only for brief intervals to foil antiradiation
missiles. Recent DARPA and DoD research programs
have been instituted with goals of less than 10 seconds
from first detection of radar pulses to generation of
fire control quality target geolocation. This level of performance
cannot be achieved by single-aircraft data processing.
Practical solutions require cooperative tactics involving
data-linked sensor platforms.
Critical parameters determining the speed and accuracy of
the geolocation solution are (a) Data link throughput and
short time latencies associated with data exchange among
cooperators, (b) Precise position, velocity, and time correlation
among all participating platforms, and (c) Computational
algorithms which use radar pulse TOA and/or
frequency information, as well as platform selfnavigation
data to generate the target position solution.
An innovative approach for combining these three critical
parameters is presented in this paper, which bases its proposed
solution on existing and developmental Link-16
technologies. Link 16 is a standard spread spectrum, antijam
data link for tactical applications. A new Link-16 data
exchange protocol ( FAST) , is now undergoing flight testing
in Link-16 (MIDS FDL) platforms, and has demonstrated
data exchange latencies in the 1-2 millisecond
range. A BAE Systems-developed enhancement of the standard
Link-16 navigation solution based on Differential
GPS processing has been shown to reduce the relative position
error among all participants to the centimeter
range, and time to within a nanosecond. Kalman Filterbased
positioning algorithms based on a variety of observation
types, such as TOA and Frequency, can provide
solution convergence within seconds given proper sensor geometry. |