A MODEL-AIDED TRACKING CONCEPT FOR RANGE SENSOR SLAVING

Abstract

Sensor slaying consists of pointing a secondary (slave) sensor to a target vehicle, coordinates of which are defined by measurements from a primary (master) sensor or set of master sensors. For typical range applications, the secondary sensor does not possess an autonomous tracking capability; thus, pointing commands for the secondary sensors must be derived from an external source, i.e., the primary sensor or system. A common example of a range slaving system consists of an optical sensor (e.g., a cine- of video theodolite) slaved to a tracking radar. In this instance, radar measurements (range, azimuth, elevation) are typically converted into a cartesian set (x, y, z), followed by the computation of the azimuth and elevation angles from the theodolite site to the designated point. These angles define commands for theodolite pointing.