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DroneSAR
I am leading the design and development of DroneSAR system, which is a first of it's kind, Drone based, fully polarimetric, S-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar. Developed jointly by University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Purdue University. Aims to generate high resolution, high accuracy measurement of soil moisture and biomass measurements.
System Overview
The Radar system operates in S-Band, center frequency 2.43GHz. RF bandwidth 175MHz, fully polarimetric and weight less than 2KG. Can carried by any large drone or fixed wing system to generate syntheitc aperture radar measurements over large area. It is capable of generating image with resolution higher than 0.5m with swath of 700m.
Full Polarimetric Calibrated
Besides the radar design, hardware integration and the imaging software. DroneSAR is fully polarimetric calibrated. Calibration achieved through both trihedral corner reflector and distributed targets. Radiometric calibration accuracy <1dB and cross talk between channels <-15dB.
Radar image is geo-referenced using onboard GNSS measurements with position error <0.5m
Soil Moisture/ Biomass Retrival
Using the data collected by the system. Algorithms for soil moisture and biomass retrieval has been developed. Demonstrating good sensitivity to both parameters, the radar can generate high quility data driving the decision of precision agriculture
Project currently funded by NSF IoT4Ag
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