A Lightweight and Low-Power UAV-Borne Ground Penetrating Radar Design for Landmine Detection

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a lightweight and low-power Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect buried landmines in harsh terrain, using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Despite the fact that GPR airborne systems have been already used for a while, there has yet been no focus on the UAV autonomy, which depends on the payload itself. Therefore, the contribution of this work is the introduction of a lightweight and low-power consumption GPR system, which is based on the Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) radar principle. The Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver represents an improved implementation of the super-heterodyne architecture, which currently offers higher sensitivity. This is achieved by combining analog and digital processing techniques. The experimental results showed that the developed system can detect both metallic and plastic buried targets. Target detection with a scanning height up to about 0.5 m shows good applicability in an unstructured, harsh environment, which is typical of mined terrain. The proposed system still needs some improvements for a fully operational system regarding different aspects of scanning speeds and soil properties such as moisture content.Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) [3]. Results have revealed that great success was achieved in landmine detection with the use of GPR. Moreover, it currently shows most potential among other technologies [4], where the main benefit is the ability to detect metal and plastic landmines down to the smallest size. The most common systems which use GPR are hand-held devices [5], ground vehicles [6] and, recently, also Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) [7]; or even a combination of them [8]. The GPR detection principle is straight forward. It is based on transmitting and receiving electromagnetic (EM) waves using antennas. EM waves reflect from metal, or transition between different dielectric materials (as is the case between soil and the landmine explosive, which is considered as the target). If a backscattered signal is received by the receiving antenna and the amplitude of the bounced signal is above the receivers noise floor, this change can be detected.As stated, UAV GPR systems already exist and they are gaining in popularity. The technology of UAVs has been developing rapidly. With data fusion of different sensors, they form a robust and smart flying platform, which operates autonomously on pre-defined tracks and avoids potential obstacles. By including the latest geo-location technology such as Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS systems, localization is improved to centimeter-level accuracy [9]. Different GPR systems have been introduced on UAVs for landmine detection. The improvement in Software Defined Radios (SDR) has shown that, besides the major use in communications, high bandwidth boards also open the possibility of short-range radar implementation for UAV use [10,11]. The SDRs can provide a quick confirmation for the proof of concept, but, in many cases, it has a disadvantage in efficiency and mobility. To overcome this, ...

Portable and Easily-Deployable Air-Launched GPR Scanner

“…Concerning the last area of application, air-launched GPR systems based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been developed in the last years [14][15][16][17][18]. Their main advantages are: (i) safety, as contact with the ground is avoided and thus the risk of accidental IED detonation is minimized; (ii) speed, as UAV-based systems are generally faster than autonomous terrestrial robots; and (iii) capability to inspect difficult-to-access areas.…”

“…Their main advantages are: (i) safety, as contact with the ground is avoided and thus the risk of accidental IED detonation is minimized; (ii) speed, as UAV-based systems are generally faster than autonomous terrestrial robots; and (iii) capability to inspect difficult-to-access areas. Analyzing the features of the different implemented prototypes [14][15][16][17][18], it can be concluded that the main challenges are the need for precise positioning and geo-referring of the GPR measurements, the limited UAV flight autonomy, and the choice of proper radiofrequency…”

Comment on the Article "A Lightweight and Low-Power UAV-Borne Ground Penetrating Radar Design for Landmine Detection"

“…The following Comment aims to correct some statements published in the article entitled "A lightweight and low-power UAV-borne ground-penetrating radar design for landmine detection" [1].…”

“…The radar has been tested with ground tests (Section 5.1 of [1]), as shown in Figure 12 of [1], where a B-scan was conducted. Then, in Section 5.2, authors show measurement results with the radar onboard a UAV, comparing the performance with other airborne-based Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) systems in Section 5.3.…”

“…This Comment is focused on the comparison presented in [1], where the authors compare the system in [1] and the one described in the publication [2]. The latter (reference No.…”