Today, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are mostly used for survey missions, but many existing applications require manipulation capabilities, such as the maintenance of permanent observatories, submerged oil wells, cabled sensor networks, and pipes; the deployment and recovery of benthic stations; or the search and recovery of black boxes. Currently, these tasks require the use of work-class remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) deployed from vessels equipped with dynamic positioning, leaving such solutions expensive to adopt. To face these challenges during the last 25 years, scientists have researched the idea of increasing the autonomy of underwater intervention systemsThis work was supported by the Spanish Project DPI2014-57746-C3-3-R (MERBOTS-ARCHROV
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral USRP NI2920, a software defined transceiver so far mainly used in Software Defined Radio applications, is adopted in this work to design a high resolution L-Band Software Defined Radar system. The enhanced available bandwidth, due to the Gigabit Ethernet interface, is exploited to obtain a higher slant-range resolution with respect to the existing Software Defined Radar implementations. A specific LabVIEW application, performing radar operations, is discussed, and successful validations are presented to demonstrate the accurate target detection capability of the proposed software radar architecture. In particular, outdoor and indoor test are performed by adopting a metal plate as reference structure located at different distances from the designed radar system, and results obtained from the measured echo are successfully processed to accurately reveal the correct target position, with the predicted slant-range resolution equal to 6 m.
A multiband Software Defined Radar based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing technique is proposed in this work for an accurate soil discontinuities detection, taking into account also the dispersive behavior of media. A multilayer soil structure is assumed as a validation test to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, by accurately retrieving the unknown thicknesses and permittivities of the soil layers.
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