'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
Airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors have been commonly used during the last decades to monitor different phenomena in medium-scale areas of observation, such as object detection and characterization or topographic mapping. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a cost-effective solution that offers higher operational flexibility than airborne systems to monitor these types of scenarios. The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya has developed the first fully polarimetric SAR system at X-band integrated into a small UAV multicopter platform (UAV MP). The sensor, called AiR-based remote sensing, has been integrated into the platform overcoming restrictions of weight, space, robustness, and power consumption. To demonstrate the validity of the developed system, some measurement campaigns have been conducted in the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) under Project TIN201455413C21P and Project TIN201455413C22P, the Research Grant BES-2012-060089, and the Unidad de Excelencia Maria de Maeztu MDM-2016-0600, which is financed by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain
