Tracking a ballistic target by multiple model approach

Radar tracking of a ballistic object flying in the Earth´s atmosphere is a very complex issue to cope with, due to the need of (suboptimal) nonlinear filtering techniques. When the characteristics of the target are poorly known, and an identification problem is added, a solution is represented by a multiple model approach. This paper investigates the problem by evaluating a number of parameters which affect the solution. The multi modal approach is compared with a generic extended Kalman filter. A theoretical limit for the performance is computed by means of the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound.