UAV-Based Urban Monitoring Using on-Board 802.11ad Radar

Shobha Sundar Ram, Kumar Vijay Mishra

Abstract: The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer low-cost, flexible, and line-of-sight deployment for radar remote sensing as well as building temporary communications base stations in inaccessible or crowded areas. Their limited battery power and small footprints is driving innovations to combine multiple functions in single hardware operating in the same spectrum. In particular, UAV-borne joint radar-communications (JRC) systems are of significant interest. In this paper, we focus on a wide-bandwidth millimeter-wave JRC system for UAVs that employ IEEE 802.11ad protocol for sensing. We model such a system for detecting dynamic users on the ground such as pedestrians and vehicles. Our method incorporates a realistic electromagnetic scattering center model of road targets and surface clutter in the pyBullet software to examine 802.11ad for UAV-borne sensing. Numerical experiments demonstrate that 802.11ad UAV-borne sensing is able to capture several micro-Doppler characteristics.