L-band staring radar performance against micro-drones

Abstract

Non-cooperative surveillance of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) commonly referred to as drones, is regarded as a key capability in the development of the EU SESAR U-SPACE vision that is aimed at unlocking airspace for operations of drones. However, drones are particularly difficult to detect with conventional non-cooperative surveillance sensors such as scanning radars as drones have a small RCS and fly low and slow. Here, we use an L-Band staring radar sensor that employs a fully digitized 2-D receiver array to achieve 3-D broad-volume continuous surveillance. The continuity of surveillance allows sufficiently high detection sensitivity to be achieved enabling location of rapidly manoeuvring drones operating in Electro-magnetically congested environments such as airports. Here, we present results from live trials using a staring radar sensor to detect small drones. Detection performance is compared with theoretical predictions.