Plane localisation for MIMO radar

We address the problem of estimating the surface profile of the ground from an airborne platform with a forward looking MIMO radar. In particular we are interested in developing a landing aid for helicopters in degraded visibility. In this paper we present an algorithm for fitting a plane surface to the data obtained from a coherent co-located MIMO radar. This algorithm is based on the common tangent algorithm (COTA) [1]. We propose an algorithm to solve the common tangent problem not only for multiple receivers but also for multiple transmitters. We show that the algorithm converges to the local minimum and does so at an approximately quadratic rate. We conclude with numerical simulations, to demonstrate the properties of the multiple-transmitter common tangent algorithm