Cognitive Radar Systems: the road to reality

Over the past fifteen years, “cognition” has emerged as an enabling technology for incorporating learning and adaptivity on both transmit and receive to optimize or make more robust the radar performance in dynamic environments.The term ‘cognitive radar’ was introduced for the first time by Dr. Simon Haykin in 2006, but the foundations of the cognitive systems date back several decades to research on knowledge-aided signal processing, and adaptive radar design.The core of cognitive radar systems is the ‘perception-action cycle’, that is the feedback mechanism within the transceiver architecture that allows the radar system to learn information about a target and its environment and adapt its transmissions so as to optimize one or more missions,according to a desired goal. Such radar systems are sometimes called “fully-adaptive”, to highlight the main novelty of these new systems compared to the classical “adaptive” ones. The adaptivity is not anymore only on receive but also on transmit. But a truly cognitive radar should not be only able to adapt on the fly its transmission waveforms and parameters based on internal fixed rules and on what learned about the environment, but it should also be able to optimize these rules learning with time from its mistakes, as a biological system does (see for instance bath and dolphin sonar system). And this is still a big challenge for radar experts.

This talk will provide an overview of the main concept, and methods for modeling cognitive processes in a radar system. Some challenges to advancing the current state-of-the art will be discussed, and insights into future directions of research will be provided.