With the material presented in the previous four chapters dealing with fundamental aspects of cognitive dynamic systems at our disposal, the stage is now set for our first application: cognitive radar, which was described for the first time by Haykin (2006a).

Radar is a remote-sensing system with numerous well-established applications in surveillance, tracking, and imaging of targets, just to name a few. In this chapter, we have chosen to focus on target tracking as the area of application. The message to take from the chapter is summed up as follows:

This profound statement has many important practical implications, which may be justified in light of what we do know about the echolocation system of a bat. The echolocation system (i.e. sonar) of a bat provides not only information about how far away a target (e.g. flying insect) is from the bat, but also information about the relative velocity of the target, the size of the target, the size of various features of the target, and azimuth and elevation coordinates of the target. The highly complex neural computations needed to extract all this information from target echoes are performed within the “size of a plum.”