A TDMA MIMO SAR radar for automated position-keeping

Abstract

This paper presents a time division multiple access (TDMA) multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a sliding range window for automated position-keeping, which can be applied in vessel tracking/escorting, offshore deepwater drillship equipment servicing, etc. A MIMO SAR sensor predefines a special part of the target (i.e., the drillship, ship, or submarine) as the measurement target and does not need special assistant devices/targets installed on the target vessel/platform, so its application is convenient. In the measurement process, the sensor scans the target with multiple ranging gates, forms images of multiple sections of the target, detects the predefined part/target in these images, and then obtains the range and angle of the predefined target for relative localization. Our MIMO SAR has 13 transmitting antennas and 8 receiving antennas. All transmitting antennas share a transmitter and all receiving antennas share a receiver using switches to reduce cost. The MIMO SAR radar has 44 effective SAR phase centers, and the azimuth angle resolution is θ0.5/44 (finest, θ 0.5 is the antenna element’s 3dB beamwidth). The transmitter transmits a chirped linear frequency modulated continuous wave (LFMCW) signal, and the receiver only processes the signal limited in the beat frequency region defined by the distance from the measurement target to the sensor and the interested measurement target extension, which is determined by the receiver bandwidth. With the sliding range window, the sensor covers a large range, and in the covered range window, it provides high accuracy measurements.