Multichannel sense-and-avoid radar for small UAVs

To unlock the economic and societal benefits of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they must possess an acceptable level of situation awareness so as not to become a public safety hazard. Implementation of a system to provide this awareness will surely involve a sense-and-avoid radar due to its capability and robustness. This paper focuses on the development of a sense-and-avoid radar system being developed for operation on a 40% scale Yak-54 UAV that will provide range, Doppler, and angle-of-arrival information of targets which might cause a collision. A two-dimensional (2-D) fast-Fourier transform (FFT) is implemented which maps targets of interest to a single range-Doppler cell. Phase differences in the target signal from an array of receiving antennas are used to determine the target echo´s three-dimensional angle-of-arrival. The complete radar system consumes slightly less than 20 W. While the investigation is still underway, initial results indicate that a frequency-modulated, continuous-wave radar system using a 2-D FFT processing algorithm is one viable solution to improve UAV situation awareness.