Abstract
Due to the substantial increase in the number of affordable drones in the consumer market and their regrettable misuse, there is a need for efficient technology to detect drones in airspace. This paper presents the characteristic radar micro-Doppler properties of drones and birds. Drones and birds both induce micro-Doppler signatures due to their propeller blade rotation and wingbeats, respectively. These distinctive signatures can then be used to differentiate a drone from a bird, along with studying them separately. Here, experimental measurements of micro-Doppler signatures of different types of drones and birds are presented and discussed. The data have been collected using two radars operating at different frequencies; K-band (24 GHz) and W-band (94 GHz). Three different models of drones and four species of birds of varying sizes have been used for data collection. The results clearly demonstrate that a phase coherent radar system can retrieve highly reliable and distinctive micro-Doppler signatures of these flying targets, both at K-band and W-band. Comparison of the signatures obtained at the two frequencies indicates that the micro-Doppler return from the W-band radar has higher SNR. However, micro-Doppler features in the K-band radar returns also reveal the micro-motion characteristics of drones and birds very effectively.
Highlights
Commercial drones have gained huge popularity in recent times due to their ease of operation, robust performance and low cost
That radar was quite short range as the maximum detection range for a Peregrine falcon was only about 50 metres. Those results showed the frequency modulation in the Peregrine spectrogram due to wing beat but the wing beat modulation was not observed for the bat
Our review of the literature suggested that there has been no reports on the following topics: a) bird micro-Doppler signature at K-band where instead of a single bird, birds of different sizes have been used for better evaluation of the micro-Doppler characteristics, b) bird micro-Doppler signature analysis at W-band, c) report of micro-Doppler signatures of different sizes of drones at W-band, d) simultaneous experimental data collection at K-band and W-band for direct comparison of the micro-Doppler features at these two different frequency bands
Summary
Commercial drones have gained huge popularity in recent times due to their ease of operation, robust performance and low cost. Work to study radar micro-Doppler signatures of drones and birds, but mainly in X-band or lower frequencies[6,7,8,9,10]. A custom built 24 GHz coherent FMCW radar was reported[17], which shows preliminary results of the spectrogram plots of drone and bird micro-Doppler. For a low power system like that we have used during data collection (transmit power about 200 mW and antenna gain of about 33 dBi), the K-band radar will have a range coverage for a typical drone or bird (RCS approximately −20 dBsm) with a 10 dB SNR of about 700 m, for a single shot measurement. This paper exclusively focuses on the micro-Doppler results from the experimental trials
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