Investigation and experiment of radar systems in unmanned arial vehicles-I

Abstract

The motivation of the project was due to the problem with bulky Radar system used onboard the Unmanned Arial Vehicles. Due to the rise in UAV usage in the world, better performance radar system is needed which resulted in the usage of Synthetic Aperture Radar System. However conventional SAR Systems are bulky and expensive. This gave rise to the idea of decreasing the size of the SAR systems that can be used onboard the UAV. The SAR system using the FMCW radar integrated with the LC VCO is a system that is small and is able to produce signals using low voltage. By tuning the voltage applied to the LC VCO, the signal produced by the FMCW Radar can be adjusted as well in order to suit different radar applications of the SAR system. The experiment and results collected were done at Nanyang Technology University at the VIRTUS, IC Design Centre of Excellence. The results obtained for simulation segment of the project is using Cadence® Virtuoso on Linux platform computer. The actual set up of the circuit is done in VIRTUS as well and results are taken using the camera of a mobile phone. The constrain faced in this project is that there is no UAV that we can mount the FMCW radar integrated with LC VCO onto. This leads to the challenge of getting the most practical results accurately. During the project, the problems encountered include the designing of circuits and fabricating the circuit board of the LC VCO to produce the signal in the frequency that we wanted. These problems have hindered the progress of the project but these problems have been resolved successfully. Additional components were designed and added to the system in order to produce the signal that is needed for the operation of the FMCW radar.