Attention Mechanism and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for the Incomplete Trajectory Information Prediction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Airborne Radar

Due to the potential for airborne radar to capture incomplete observational information regarding unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectories, this study introduces a novel approach called Node-former, which integrates neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) and the Informer framework. The proposed method exhibits high accuracy in trajectory prediction, even in scenarios with prolonged data interruptions. Initially, data outside the acceptable error range are discarded to mitigate the impact of interruptions on prediction accuracy. Subsequently, to address the irregular sampling caused by data elimination, NODEs are utilized to transform computational interpolation into an initial value problem (IPV), thus preserving informative features. Furthermore, this study enhances the Informer’s encoder through the utilization of time-series prior knowledge and introduces an ODE solver as the decoder to mitigate fluctuations in the original decoder’s output. This approach not only accelerates feature extraction for long sequence data, but also ensures smooth and robust output values. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of Node-former in trajectory prediction with interrupted data compared to traditional algorithms.