Radar-On-Chip laboratory characterization for UAM applications

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a safe, accessible, automated, and affordable air transportation system, exploiting the third dimension for passengers' transportation and goods delivery. Drones for delivering goods become today an important part of modern logistics in full expansion: they allow to optimize time to delivery, decongest urban environment and reduce CO2 emissions. This class of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) will fly in a dedicated airspace, indicated as Very Low Level (<500 feet). However, considering typical dimensions of logistic drones, compared with civil aircraft or helicopters, it is unrealistic to continuously track or control them by using radar or satellite technologies. For this reason, only operations in Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) are allowed today and one of the most important aspects related to safety of flight is undoubtedly the availability of on-board Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems: they will constitute one of the main enablers for fully automated Beyond Visual Line of Sight (B-VLOS) missions and will also enable, in the future, people transportation by drones. This paper focuses on the characterization of Texas Instruments IWR1642 Radar-On-Chip, widely used in automotive sector, to evaluate its application in an obstacles detection system for UAM operations, which will be developed in the framework of a PhD activities.