Industrial PhD Studentship in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle deployed Ground-Penetrating Radar for Buried Object Detection

The research is aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in the deployment of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) from unmanned aerial vehicles. There is a growing commercial interest in airborne systems that are capable of detecting buried targets for a range of applications including defence, humanitarian geotechnical, and archaeological applications. The project is in partnership with Dstl and supported by an iCASE scholarship.

Weight and energy are at a premium for unmanned aerial vehicle applications, and therefore this PhD research project will investigate the specific technological challenges of developing lightweight antennas and their associated coupling components. Radar electronic hardware suitable for a UAV deployed GPR will also be a potential area of research.

An approach for obtaining information over an area of ground is to use synthetic aperture radar techniques and this is a further potential subject area for the project to advance.

. Antenna arrays variants will be developed for each, as these have different scientific challenges. For the case of ground vehicles, the radar reflection from the ground presents a serious confounding signal, especially as the ground coupling is so variable. In the case of airborne vehicles, the antennas must be designed to minimise signal attenuation / maximise directivity and ground loading can largely be ignored. Although these are different considerations, there are complementary aspects that make both deployment scenarios suitable for investigation in one project, for example, the design of light-weight antennas and electronic system components.

The project will focus on producing GPR antennas suitable for future use on unmanned aerial vehicles. The main stages of this project are:
1. Investigate existing and new designs of lightweight antennas that are suitable for GPR when deployed in proximal mode (antennas either touching the ground or slightly offset above the ground but still close enough to have a ground-coupling effect) and a separate design for stand-off mode (air-launched).
2. Design new antennas via modelling and laboratory tests, taking account of the requirement specification, especially aspects of size, weight and aerodynamics. The designed antennas need to be suitable for deployment in arrays to allow for sufficient ground coverage. The proximal and stand-off modes may require very different array densities and should be carefully modelled. The array design could involve new concepts such as thin-film/conformal/flexible/optically transparent ultra-wide-band antennas, for instance using graphene or more conventional metal films (ITO / Ti). Additional options investigating fractal and electronic band gap methods of reducing antenna size while retaining adequate performance will be considered.
3. Fabricate the highest performing modelled proximal and stand-off array designs.
4. Demonstration of a functioning radar system, with the two antenna array variants as separate plug-ins. The UoM has recently invested in a 16 channel VNA that can be used for these tests. Deployment on to the vehicles should then be possible by utilising recent developments in commercial radar ICs - to achieve good signal-to-noise ratios while under the constraints of small size, light weight and low power.
It is intended that the student will collaborate with the researcher awarded the related studentship on Signal Processing, and their combined effort would build an overall stronger output, however this proposal would produce very worthwhile results in itself.

Note: Integration of the antenna arrays onto unmanned vehicles is outside the scope of the project. However, the antenna arrays will be designed to meet realistic weight, size, power requirements; with the algorithms designed to be suitable for mobile data processing.