UAV for Landmine Detection Using SDR-Based GPR Technology

Abstract

This chapter presents an approach for explosive-landmine detection on-board an autonomous aerial drone. The chapter describes the design, implementation and integration of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) using a software defined radio (SDR) platform into the aerial drone. The chapter's goal is first to tackle in detail the development of a customdesigned lightweight GPR by approaching interplay between hardware and software radio on an SDR platform. The SDR-based GPR system results on a much lighter sensing device compared against the conventional GPR systems found in the literature and with the capability of re-configuration in real-time for different landmines and terrains, with the capability of detecting landmines under terrains with different dielectric characteristics. Secondly, the chapter introduce the integration of the SDR-based GPR into an autonomous drone by describing the mechanical integration, communication system, the graphical user interface (GUI) together with the landmine detection and geo-mapping. This chapter approach completely the hardware and software implementation topics of the on-board GPR system given first a comprehensive background of the software-defined radar technology and second presenting the main features of the Tx and Rx modules. Additional details are presented related with the mechanical and functional integration of the GPR into the UAV system.

Drone-mounted GPR surveying: flight-height considerations for diffraction-based velocity analysis

“…Drones offer logistical advantages for applications involving rugged, dangerous and/or inaccessible terrains, e.g. over water courses (Lane Jr, 2019;Edemsky et al, 2021), at sites contaminated with unexploded ordnance (Cerquera, Montaño and Mondragón, 2017;García-Fernández et al, 2020;Šipoš and Gleich, 2020) or over crevassed glacier fields (Mankoff et al, 2020). Even for practical terrains, an autonomous drone following a pre-programmed flight path (Hammack et al, 2020) improves efficiency by allowing surveyors to deploy other equipment (e.g., systems that require manual installation such as seismic and/or resistivity methods).…”

“…Even for practical terrains, an autonomous drone following a pre-programmed flight path (Hammack et al, 2020) improves efficiency by allowing surveyors to deploy other equipment (e.g., systems that require manual installation such as seismic and/or resistivity methods). Although drone-based GPR surveys are subject to at least two sets of legislation, that regulate drone operations (e.g., Valentine, 2019) and GPR emissions (e.g., Ofcom, 2019), several recent studies have demonstrated advantages of the acquisition platform (Cerquera, Montaño and Mondragón, 2017;Chandra and Tanzi, 2018;Garcia-Fernandez et al, 2020;Edemsky et al, 2021).…”

Measurement of Snow Water Equivalent Using Drone-Mounted Ultra-Wide-Band Radar

“…There is a vast variety of applications for drone-mounted radar including archaeological investigations; detection of buried mines [1,2]; soil moisture mapping [3], snow, ice, and glacier measurements [4,5]; and mapping of civil infrastructure [6,7]. With regards to snow, one application is snow water equivalent (SWE) measurements, which is of great interest for the hydropower industry and other disciplines in need of meteorological data.…”

Complex analysis of GPR signalsfor the delineation of subsurface subtle features

“…When the energy encounters a buried object or a boundary between materials having different dielectric permittivity, it may be reflected or refracted or scattered back to the surface. A receiving antenna can then record the variations in the return signal (Daniels 2004, Jol 2009, Cerquera 2017.…”