CBL - Campus del Baix Llobregat

Projecte llegit

Títol: Contribution to the development of microwave remote sensing for UAV systems.

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: GONZÁLEZ ARBESU, JOSÉ MARIA

Departament: TSC

Títol: Contribution to the development of microwave remote sensing for UAV systems.

Data inici oferta: 12-02-2022     Data finalització oferta: 13-02-2022


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    MU DRONS
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: Fora UPC    
 
        Supervisor/a extern: Roger Jove Casulleras
        Institució/Empresa: Microwave Sensors and Electronics SL
        Titulació del Director/a: PhD
 
Paraules clau:
Radar, radiometer, Earth observation, microwave, remote sensing
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:

The Maser thesis will have two blocks based on the contributions
made by the candidate.

- Block A, design, implementation, test and validation of a
thermal control circuit. This circuit is of broad application in
MWSE systems. In particular, it is to be used on later MWSE
systems like the radar being developed. It can be also used for
thermal control of L-band radiometers.

- Block B, design, implementation, test and validation of
electromagnetic interference filters with a software defined
radio (SDR). This block is to be used on the mitigation of
interferences in microwave radiometers (specially those mounted
on drones), and to be potentially used by the SDR radar being
developed.

 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Microwave technology is very sensitive to Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI). Works previously done within this Master by Marc Jou [1] showed the impossibility to retrieve measurements using L-band radiometers on-board drones. After detecting such issue, Balamis first tried to solve it by hardware: a new antenna design and the extensive use of shielding on the drone were tried without success.

Balamis started the development of its first digital radiometer based on the use of Software Defined Radio architecture on 2017, partially funded with the support of CDTI. The resulting minimum viable digital radiometer was ready by June 2019, but it did not include any RFI mitigation capability. Developments done my Master student Ahmad Daoud [2] demonstrated the identification of RFI using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) over RAW data but could not provide any efficient implementation of its mitigation on-board the L-band radiometer.

The proposed solution is the implementation of the FFT and the RFI filters using Field Programmable Gate of Array (FPGA) for the input signals, and its concurrent performance. Filtering an analog signal by introducing in-system FFT of ZYNQ7000 FPGA is implemented in this project.

Additionally, the power consumption of FPGA, and the need to dissipate it, forces the development of a temperature control system with cooling capabilities. It is done to improve the previous heating-only thermal control of Balamis radiometer. Such more advanced thermal control will be also used for the Interferometric Ground-based Synthetic Aperture Radar that Balamis is developing.

Solving these two goals are therefore the purpose of this Master Thesis.

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