STIF: A Spatial–Temporal Integrated Framework for End-to-End Micro-UAV Trajectory Tracking and Prediction With 4-D MIMO Radar

The early trajectory prediction of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) with random behavior intentions facilitates the elimination of potential safety hazards. However, due to the property of a small radar cross Section (RCS), the backscattered radar signals from micro-UAVs may be submerged under strong background clutters, leading to distorted tracking and false prediction. To this end, this article presents a spatial–temporal integrated framework (STIF) for end-to-end micro-UAV trajectory tracking and prediction based on a 4-D multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Especially, to obtain accurate trajectories in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, the target detection and tracking are considered to be interdependent and addressed jointly in this work, rather than treating them as two separate processes in conventional methods. The advantage is that with the assistance of tracking, all consecutive spatial information encoded in raw radar streams can be incorporated to enhance the continuous detection performance, avoiding information loss using only one single scan. Subsequently, to accommodate high maneuvering scenarios, an intention-aware end-to-end transformer-based prediction framework is presented to simultaneously discover both spatial and temporal dependencies hiding in long-term estimated trajectories. Consequently, a 4-D frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is utilized to evaluate the proposed system. Numerous simulation and experimental results indicate that STIF outperforms competing state-of-the-art methods and achieve superior prediction performance with the accuracy of 0.3851 m in low SNR conditions.