Search and Rescue: Surveillance support from RPAs radar
D. Tarchi, Giorgio Guglieri, Michele Vespe, Ciro Gioia, Francesco Sermi, V. Kyovtorov · 2017
The migratory flow across the Mediterranean sea has lost its “emergency” nature and has become more than ever an everyday reality. There is an evident need to strengthen the control at the European external borders and in particular in the Mediterranean sea, where the surveillance system must also support Search and Rescue (SaR) operations. In this contest the JRC, together with the Politecnico di Torino, have recently developed a solution for maritime surveillance consisting of two complementary low-cost systems: an aerostat-radar that provides long-term, large-range coverage and a rapid deployment drone-radar to perform focused surveillance and to support SaR operations. The joint employment of these two unmanned systems would allow enhancing the space/time surveillance capabilities of the fleet patrolling the south-east Mediterranean sea, maintaining reasonable costs. The present work introduces this systems and focuses on the integration between the radar, represented by a coherent FMCW sensor operating in Ku band, and the navigation system, implemented with low-cost IMU and GNSS receiver. In fact, an accurate synchronization between the two subsystems is fundamental in order to properly geo-reference the radar picture, whenever the sensor operates on a moving platform. To this end, several solution have been investigated and the selected approach has been tested on the field. The results of the experimentation are provided in terms of both: determination of attitude and position of the radar platform and consistency of the radar picture. No drift nor bias in the attitude and position parameters have been observed and the reconstructed radar pictures appears coherent between multiple radar revolutions.