MSGate: A Multi-Scale Gated Temporal Network for Radar Tracking of Highly Maneuverable UAVs

Abstract

Accurate radar tracking of highly maneuverable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a key enabling technology for low-altitude airspace surveillance, counter-UAS defense, and UAS traffic management (UTM). Once a non-cooperative UAV has been detected, estimating its motion state must cope with nonlinear polar-coordinate observations, unknown maneuver-mode switching, and multi-scale state variations driven by agile drone flight, making it difficult for classical IMM/UKF filters and deep sequence models to preserve local maneuver response and long-term temporal consistency. We propose MSGate, a multi-scale gated temporal network organized along an “observation-representation-fusion-constraint” pipeline. A non-learnable physical front end maps polar measurements into a Cartesian observation trajectory of the same dimension as the UAV state. Multi-scale gated convolution and RoPE-Transformer encoding extract local maneuver responses and long-range dependencies. A shared gated dual-path decoder fuses the two paths adaptively at each time step and channel, and velocity-smoothness and position-velocity kinematic consistency terms regularize the predicted trajectory. On the real-UAV datasets UZH-FPV, EuRoC MAV, and NeuroBEM, under a unified range-azimuth observation protocol, MSGate attains the lowest average position and velocity errors (Pos-RMSE 0.0486m; Vel-RMSE 0.1767m/s), outperforming the strongest time-series baseline TimeMixer, and generalizes to a separate nano-quadrotor dataset (NanoBench). MSGate provides an accurate, maneuver-robust solution for radar state estimation of highly maneuverable UAVs.