Abstract
The light-small multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) carrying with a mini synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload has provided an advanced information acquisition technology for the target detecting and imaging fields. In this paper, a W-band compact SAR system is proposed, which has been successfully deployed on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform demonstrating state-of-the-art imaging resolution of about 4.5 cm. In order to achieve remarkable compactness, light weight and powersaving feature for the proposed system, the techniques of the three-dimensional (3-D) integration are adopted, where a whole-system size of only 67 × 60×50 mm 3 and the weight of 400 g are obtained. This proposed system achieves higher SAR-imaging resolution thanks to the contributions of many efforts, including the technique of high-linearity waveform generation, the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) antenna with high isolation by the electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) mechanism, and a novel motion compensation method for the imaging formation. To validate this proposed idea, a UAV SAR prototype operating at W-band is designed and fabricated. The measurements show great signal-to-noise ratio imaging results with excellent focusing effect. The proposed SAR system is promisingly an ideal candidate for the target detecting/imaging applications deployed on the UAV platform.
Highlights
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-borne radars have aroused great interests in the academic communities and in the industrial applications
This paper further presents such compact W-band drone-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system in detail to offer new possibilities in observation
It is worth mentioning that the low-loss connection between antennas and millimeter-wave front-end is achieved by using the vertical transmission line interconnection technology. This SAR system prototype has the weight of 400 g, the volume of 67 mm × 60 mm × 50 mm, and the system power consumption of about 25 watts
Summary
UAV-borne radars have aroused great interests in the academic communities and in the industrial applications. The development of a UAV-based SAR with miniaturized size and high resolution is of particular worth for remote sensing applications As the operation frequency goes higher, especially in terahertz bands, traditional integration methods (e.g., the connection between flanges for waveguides) have encountered similar size-reduction bottleneck [17] All these traditional solutions still demonstrates limitations and challenges on the size reduction of the SAR payload, and the improvement for imaging resolution. Low power consumption, which can be integrated through three-dimensional feasibly
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