Ricerc@Sapienza

Currently there is a strong interest in transported radar systems, in which the radar receiver can be mounted either on air or land vehicles. One of the main challenges of these systems is to properly filter the interferences produced by the so-called clutter, which refers to all the reflections given by non-moving scatterers located within the radar coverage.
In this perspective, the aim of the proposed project is to develop filtering techniques for clutter cancellation based on the use of Non-Uniform Linear Arrays (NULAs). These arrays are particularly suited for low-budget radar applications, due to their lightness and their low economic and computational costs.
The interest in transported radar systems is being fostered by industries such as the security and the automotive ones. On the one hand, the recent advancements in the development of unmanned vehicles has completely revolutionised the way of thinking about security systems, which in turn has generated great interest in the use of radar systems that have to deal with moving unmanned vehicles. On the other hand, the automotive industry has defined the concept of automotive radar: a radar that, in addition to classical tasks such as detection and tracking, has to be designed with a view to the avoidance of vehicle collisions.
Within the scope of the project, we also aim at validating the proposed cancellation techniques through experimental campaigns, exploiting a mechanical and electronic testing system that is already 90% developed. The experimental framework developed allows to test the filtering techniques in the case study of a passive radar exploiting DVB-T signals, moving the radar along with the entire acquisition system so as to simulate a vehicle with a previously configured speed pattern. This will allow us to test the proposed cancellation techniques in an extremely realistic environment, giving rise to strong and closed conclusions regarding the use of NULAs in state-of-the-art technologies.