Lever arm rotation compensation method for UAV mounted SAR

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is an ideal platform for compact Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to perform missions agilely while bearing more random vibration and rotation inevitably in flight. The GPS antenna and radar antennas could not be fixed on the platform at totally the same position. In common airborne SAR, GPS antenna position plus a constant coordinates value could represent the radar antenna position because of placidly flight. But it is different to common airplanes small UAV could not fly placidly and so the difference between GPS antenna and radar antenna global coordinates is changing while the helicopter´s attitude is changing. This paper presents an algorithm to compensate the position error caused by attitude changing. Finally the AMUSAR imaging results is shown to approve the method´s validity.