ONERA DRIVE Project

Inhalt:
Future UAV employment in the civilian areas of surveillance (pollution, natural risks prevention, fire prevention), monitoring (traffic control, environmental monitoring, earth observation) and communication relays becomes unavoidable. Many payload configurations may be used in UAV operations, but compared to systems working in other spectral regions (such as optical or infrared sensors), radar has the main advantage to be able to operate in all-weather condition. A concept of 3D imaging radar in Ka-Band radar is presented in this paper. A demonstrator of this radar has been integrated into under-wings pods that are fixed on a STEMME S10VT motorglider. This radar concept combines real aperture in the cross-track direction, by the antennas geometrical aperture, and synthetic aperture in the along-track direction, realized with the aircraft motion. The DRIVE radar has been developed and built to fly on board an UAV vehicle, but current airplane used for testing applications is a STEMME S10-VT motorglider. The radar definition will be detailed, and first results obtained on Fall 2006 will be exposed.