Simulating a drone and bird as radar targets

Hello,

I am currently working on my senior design project, and we are working on classifying drone vs bird using radar and micro-doppler and classification algorithm. We are not doing any actual experimentations, so we are doing almost everything in simulation using matlab, simulink and Python. My question is, how do we simulate a complex moving target such as a drone with possibly multiple rotors, and a bird with flapping wings in Matlab or simulink, is there a toolbox for such thing?

Thank you in advance, We can use all the help we can get.

P.S I have access to most tools and apps

Best

Answer 1

[Paul Hoffrichter]

Sounds like a good project. Personally, I would take a movie of a bird and a drone, and then try to reconstruct a 3D polygon of the image or at least a cardboard image for a number of frames to capture the flapping of the wings and rotation of the rotors. Then simulate a radar beam on the cardboard frames to see what I get.

Lots of different kinds of birds which will have their own signature. But I found a MATLAB simulation of a pidgeon flapping its wings.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23155-pigeon-m

More on pidgeons:

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/50/19990 and its PDF file:

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/50/19990.full.pdf

Maybe if you write to the authors of that paper, they will send you some of their MATLAB code. (This actually works sometimes.)

Here are some other articles I found related to a radar image of a bird (actually, two birds close together).

https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/analyzing-bird-flight-patterns-with-matlab.html

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.613.8314&rep=rep1&type=pdf