As part of the effort to provide navigation of aircraft through terrain and obstacles in a degraded visual environment (DVE) due to fog, smoke, rain, and other whiteout conditions, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (CCDC ARL) is developing a forward-looking 3-D synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The program includes an electromagnetic modeling (EM) study, and the development of a hardware prototype and signal processing algorithms. We propose a 35-GHz SAR system using a 1-D array of antennas combined with the synthetic aperture of the aircraft’s forward motion to provide 3-D SAR imagery for obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we study the baseline performance of this forward-looking Ka-band 3-D SAR imaging for the helicopter landing application, and determine the key challenges and associated signal processing research problems that need to be addressed.

Date Published: 13 May 2019
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10994, Passive and Active Millimeter-Wave Imaging XXII, 109940I (13 May 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2519078

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10994:
Passive and Active Millimeter-Wave Imaging XXII
David A. Wikner; Duncan A. Robertson, Editor(s)