Preliminary Study of a Millimeter Wave FMCW InSAR for UAS Indoor Navigation

Sensors

Antonio F. Scannapieco¹  Alfredo Renga² 

[1] Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, Piazzale Tecchio 80, Naples 80125, Italy;

关键词: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR);    interferometry;    unmanned aerial systems (UAS);    indoor;    navigation;    frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW);    millimeter wave;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s150202309

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Small autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS) could be used for indoor inspection in emergency missions, such as damage assessment or the search for survivors in dangerous environments, e.g., power plants, underground railways, mines and industrial warehouses. Two basic functions are required to carry out these tasks, that is autonomous GPS-denied navigation with obstacle detection and high-resolution 3D mapping with moving target detection. State-of-the-art sensors for UAS are very sensitive to environmental conditions and often fail in the case of poor visibility caused by dust, fog, smoke, flames or other factors that are met as nominal mission scenarios when operating indoors. This paper is a preliminary study concerning an innovative radar sensor based on the interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) principle, which has the potential to satisfy stringent requirements set by indoor autonomous operation. An architectural solution based on a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) scheme is proposed after a detailed analysis of existing compact and lightweight SAR. A preliminary system design is obtained, and the main imaging peculiarities of the novel sensor are discussed, demonstrating that high-resolution, high-quality observation of an assigned control volume can be achieved.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.