Abstract

Nowadays usage of radars is no longer reserved only for the military purpose. It finds many applications in various areas of science and industry. It may be used in order to obtain extended information about the state of critical infrastructure, like shipyards or petrochemical plants. Furthermore, it may be applied in vision denied environments.

The aim of this project was to create a radar system, capable of detecting nearby objects and providing distance measurements. The final product was expected to be omnidirectional, due to the usage of a rotary head.

Hardware layer was significantly reduced by applying the highly integrated radar frontend RFbeam K-MC1, attached to the National Instruments board, that is executing digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, using both, the FPGA and the realtime processor. The rotary head is based on a stepper motor. The entire software was created using LabView, the graphical programming environment. The radar uses frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW), which is a low cost technique, providing high resolution measurements. It is extremely popular in the automotive industry, what makes the components easily accessible.

All actions mentioned above resulted in getting a correctly working short range radar system, that is proving highly accurate measurements. It underwent series of tests, that have proven its reliability.

Acknowledgement: This paper is a result of the SCOTT project (www.scott-project.eu) which has received funding from the Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 737422. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Austria, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway.

The document reflects only the author’s view and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

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