Air Systems Division

Air Systems Division

Surface Radar - Technical Business Unit Radar

Ref: 092004

Location: Hengelo, Netherlands

Duration: minimum 3 months

Start Date: As soon as possible

Active in the sectors Aerospace, Defence and Security, Thales Netherland, with 2,000 employees, is a top-provider of hightech jobs. Striving to constantly innovate products and take swift advantage of the latest technological opportunities are the driving forces behind our actions.

The business unit Surface Radar develops advanced radar systems. The department Engineering is responsible for the system definition and the development of innovative algorithms for, e.g., tracking. Tracking can be described as ‘The processing of measurements obtained from objects in order to estimate the states of these objects’. In case of a radar system, the object of interest can be an aircraft with the position and the velocity as the states.

A particle filter is a relative new, promising approach the deal with estimation problems in nonlinear, non-Gaussian systems. Application of particle filters can be found in, e.g., robotics, sonar, radar and image recognition. In a radar system, particle filters can applied to tracking, see for example [1].

[1] B. Ristic, S. Arulampalam, and N. Gordon, Beyond the Kalman Filter – Particle Filters for Tracking Applications, Artech House, Boston, MA, 2004.

When tracking closely spaced objects a phenomenon referred to as track coalescence occurs. This phenomenon is caused by the fact that the system is uncertain about the label of the objects. In case of 2 objects 2 different labelings exist, in case of n objects, there are n! different labelings. In a joint state PF the problem exhibits itself as the so-called mixed labelling problem. In a Kalman Filter based approach the problem leads to the well-studied track coalescence problem. In this study we would like to explore how external information (e.g. objects cannot overtake one another) could be included into the modeling and how this could be exploited in filtering solutions.

Profile of candidates

• Master
• Internship or graduation assignment
• Applied Physics / Mathematics / Electrical Engineering
• Physical modeling, signal processing, algorithm development, Matlab

To Apply

If you are interested in this opportunity please send your application by email to stagebureau@nl.thalesgroup.com mentioning the reference 092004.