A software-defined multifunctional radar sensor for linear and reciprocal displacement measurement

A software-defined multifunctional radar sensor is developed in this paper for linear and reciprocal displacement measurement. Experiments were performed to demonstrate the high accuracy of the two measurement methodologies. When configured in arctangent-demodulated interferometry mode with a 5.46 GHz carrier frequency, the sensor can measure the displacement with sub-millimeter error at a detection distance of 1.2 m. When configured in nonlinear vibrometer mode, the sensor can measure amplitudes of reciprocal motions with a resolution of 0.4 millimeter and less than 3% average error.