Radar Systems & Waveforms

Air Systems Division

Surface Radar - Technical Business Unit Radar - Engineering

Ref: 092003

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.

In a radar system, the measured range and/or the Doppler frequency shift can be ambiguous. The ambiguity can be solved in time by proper selection of the transmitted waveforms. It is expected that using a particle filter, the measurement ambiguity can be implicitly solved in both dimensions. This would mean that no dedicated algorithms to solve the measurement ambiguity are required anymore. Possibly, the requirements on waveforms are also more relaxed when using particle filters instead of conventional algorithms to solve measurement ambiguity. In summary, the goal of this study is to explore the possibilities and possible advantages of solving measurement ambiguity in a radar system using particle filters.

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 092003.