Current students

The objective of the Ph.D. activity is to develop a demonstrator for an S-Band Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) implementing two Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The work started from the actual definition of the system specification, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The whole system architecture was based on Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Hardware that we have had to configure to adapt to our needs. In particular, we have chosen the USRP B210 Software Defined Radio (SDR) to transmit the CHIRP waveform at a sample rate of 56MHz from the first drone and collect the reflected signal from the same board mounted on the second drone. We have already performed a set of trials on the ground to validate the system's performance. The first results are promising because we could well compensate for the phase drift caused by the boards' clock misalignment by exploiting the crosstalk between the two antennas as a reference. We are now mounting the complete hardware setup on the drones to be ready to perform the actual experiment off the ground. Meanwhile, we are developing simulations to find the best UAV trajectory for the test and forecast the impact of the positioning error of the drones in the final focused image.