Designing a Multichannel Sense-and-Avoid Radar for Small UASs

This thesis presents the design, analysis and test results of a 1.445 GHz Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) collision-avoidance radar for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs). This radar system is being developed by the department of Electrical Engineering (EE) in coordination with the Aerospace Engineering (AE) department and is intended to provide situational awareness for a 40% Yak-54 model aircraft by providing range, radial velocity and angle-of-arrival (AoA) information for nearby targets. A target's range and Doppler is determined by employing a two-dimensional (2-D) Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on the received signal which maps the target to a specific range-Doppler bin. An array of receiving antennas is used to determine a target's elevation and azimuth angles by exploiting the received signal's phase difference at each individual antenna.