FMCW radar

I worked on the hardware and software design of a compact portable Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar. The back-end module consists in a PIC32MX795F512L microcontroller where the signal processing modules are programmed in C and executed in real-time. The front-end module is designed in-house on a four layer PCB. The radar is based on the Infineon voltage controller oscillator BGT24MTR12 connected to one-transmit and two-receive patch antennas.

The radar is suitable for several applications such as surveillance, presence detection, obstacle avoidance, speed estimation, and health care applications. Depending on the mode of operation, the radar can carry out 8 scans per second. The rate drops to 2 scans per second when the velocity estimation algorithm (slow time processing) is activated.

The references below give a detailed description of the developed mmWave sensor and some MATLAB scripts to plot the outputted radar raw data.

References

1. S. Jardak, T. Kiuru, M. Metso, S. Ahmed, and M.-S. Alouini, “Compact mmWave FMCW Radar: Implementation and Performance Analysis,” in IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Magazine, July 2018.
2. S. Jardak et al., ”Detection and localization of multiple short range targets using FMCW radar signal,” 2016 Global Symposium on Millimeter Waves (GSMM) & ESA Workshop on Millimetre-Wave Technology and Applications, Espoo, 2016.
3. T. Kiuru, S. Jardak, et al., ”Movement and respiration detection using statistical properties of the FMCW radar signal,” 2016 Global Symposium on Millimeter Waves (GSMM) & ESA Workshop on Millimetre-Wave Technology and Applications, Espoo, 2016.
4. FMCW gitlab repository, Accessed: Mar. 2019.