A portable 3D Imaging FMCW MIMO Radar Demonstrator with a 24x24 Antenna Array for Medium Range Applications

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars have been shown to improve target detection for surveillance applications thanks to their proven high-performance properties. In this paper, the design, implementation, and results of a complete 3-D imaging frequency-modulated continuous-wave MIMO radar demonstrator are presented. The radar sensor working frequency range spans between 16 and 17 GHz, and the proposed solution is based on a 24-transmitter and 24-receiver MIMO radar architecture, implemented by timedivision multiplexing of the transmit signals. A modular approach based on conventional low-cost printed circuit boards is used for the transmit and receive systems. Using digital beamforming algorithms and radar processing techniques on the received signals, a high-resolution 3-D sensing of the range, azimuth, and elevation can be calculated. With the current antenna configuration, an angular resolution of 2.9° can be reached. Furthermore, by taking advantage of the 1-GHz bandwidth of the system, a range resolution of 0.5 m is achieved. The radio-frequency front-end, digital system and radar signal processing units are here presented. The medium-range surveillance potential and the high-resolution capabilities of the MIMO radar are proved with results in the form of radar images captured from the field measurements.Ganis, A.; Miralles-Navarro, E.; Schoenlinner, B.; Prechtel, U.; Meusling, A.; Heller, C.; Spreng, T.... (2018). A portable 3D Imaging FMCW MIMO Radar Demonstrator with a 24x24 Antenna Array for Medium Range Applications. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. 56(1):298-312. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2017.2746739S29831256