Dual Radar SAR Controller

TL;DR

This paper presents a user guide for a dual radar SAR scanner system with advanced motion control, enabling efficient multiband fusion imaging and precise target positioning using MATLAB-based GUI and microcontroller synchronization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dual radar SAR scanner system with multi-axis motion control and synchronization, facilitating advanced imaging and data collection capabilities.

Findings

System supports multiband fusion imaging.

High-speed precise positioning achieved through microcontroller synchronization.

Flexible multi-axis motion control for target and radar positioning.

Abstract

The following is a user guide for the Dual Radar SAR Controller graphical user interface (GUI) to operate the dual radar synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scanner. The scanner was designed in the Spring semester of 2022 by Josiah Smith (RA), Yusef Alimam (UG), and Geetika Vedula (UG) with multiple axes of motion for the radar and target under test. The system is operated by a personal computer (PC) running MATLAB. An AMC4030 motion controller is employed to control the mechanical system. An ESP32 microcontroller synchronizes the mechanical motion and radar frame firing to achieving precise positioning at high movement speeds; the software was designed by Josiah Smith (RA) and Benjamin Roy (UG). A second system is designed that employs 3-axes of motion (X-Y + rotation) for fine control over the location of the target under test. The entire system is capable of efficiently collecting data from colocated and non-colocated radars for multiband fusion imaging in addition to simple single radar imaging.