Advanced Cognitive Radar: Principles, Systems, and Essential Applications

Cognitive radar enhances traditional radar systems by equipping them with the ability to sense, understand, learn, reason, and make decisions, thus enabling these systems to adapt to increasingly complex and dynamic electromagnetic environments. This adaptive capability significantly improves radar performance in specific missions, including target detection, tracking, and recognition. However, despite its promising potential, cognitive radar is still in the early stages of development, transitioning from theoretical concepts to practical implementation, with many foundational theories and technologies remaining underdeveloped. Current works are primarily focused on optimizing waveforms under the assumption of prior knowledge, often overlooking a comprehensive and practical perspective of radar systems. These approaches lead to challenges such as overly idealistic assumptions, difficulties in obtaining prior knowledge, and the complexity of waveform diversity schemes and design algorithms. To advance the practical application of cognitive radar systems, this paper addresses key issues in two critical domains: clutter suppression and jamming countermeasures. We propose solutions based on cognitive radar, focusing on the development of the required hardware systems for these tasks and the design of their closed-loop operation processes. Experimental results, derived from actual measurement data, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in both clutter suppression and jamming countermeasures.