Accessible synthetic aperture radar system for autonomous vehicle sensing

The usage of autonomous vehicles is rapidly expanding on both the ground and air. With more autonomous vehicles in close proximity to humans, new and better sensors need to be developed to manage these relationships, both good and bad. This new age of autonomous activity will bring both new opportunity and new threats to people and property. One of these threats will be from cheap, very functional unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Currently, there is very little we can do to detect and track these vehicles, without expensive and typically unaccessible military grade sensors, such as radar. To provide a response to these threats, in a ubiquitous manner, low cost, accessible systems capable of detecting and tracking dubious UAV activity must be developed. This research effort is to develop a low cost, accessible sensor system with sufficient power and accuracy to be utilized in a number of task domains throughout the robotics and autonomous systems field, including for UAV detection and tracking. To make these systems accessible, the systems are flexible in terms of power and range, but a fully functioning radar system that anyone, such as local first responder organizations can afford. Given these requirements, we started with a design for a low cost synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and built the components. The basic design was modified to specifically address the challenges of being autonomous, low cost and mobile and to detect objects with minimal cross section. In the end the result is a promising system that can detect very small objects in an acceptable range.