Dr Carmine Clemente, Domenico Gaglione, Christos Ilioudis

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly increasing. Companies are recognising the potential of UAVs for business applications, and as the cost of the technology decreases, UAVs are becoming more attractive to the leisure market. As a greater number of UAVs take-off, it is proving difficult to control their deployment in the air space, and authorities are concerned that their rapid uptake poses a significant risk to safety and security. To enable the early detection, classification and tracking of UAVs, a team from the University of Strathclyde has developed GUAPO, a Passive Bistatic Radar (PBR) system based on GNSS. The aim is to monitor sensitive areas such as restricted air spaces around airfields but the system could also be deployed for major public events or to support UAV use for e-commerce. A PBR system exploits existing sources of electromagnetic illumination to accomplish radar tasks such as detection, parameter estimation and recognition. This sensor family is attractive due to the continuous coverage it can deliver and the low resource requirements making the system very cost-effective. The team has developed and tested the technology and are now commercialising the idea.

Contact:
carmine.clemente@strath.ac.uk
www.strath.ac.uk