Doppler Tracking

Abstract

This study addresses the development of a methodology using the Doppler Effect for high-resolution, short-range tracking of small projectiles and vehicles. Minimal impact on the design of the moving object is achieved by incorporating only a transmitter in it and using ground stations for all other components. This is particularly useful for tracking objects such as sports balls that have configurations and materials that are not conducive to housing onboard instrumentation. The methodology developed here uses four or more receivers to monitor a constant frequency signal emitted by the object. Efficient and accurate schemes for filtering the raw signals, determining the instantaneous frequencies, time synching the frequencies from each receiver, smoothing the synced frequencies, determining the relative velocity and radius of the object and solving the nonlinear system of equations for object position in three dimensions as a function of time are developed and described here