Ka-Band Drone SAR Flying without GPS

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost Ka-band drone-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging system flying without motion sensor. This study is motivated by the demands from industry for a smaller, lighter and low-cost microwave camera after our successful development of a Ku-band drone-borne SAR systems a few years ago. The main contribution of this paper is on a robust autofocus algorithm for compensating for the platform motion errors due to platform engine vibration and air turbulence without GPS.