ABSTRACT
Long gravity waves or swell dominating the sea surface is known to be very useful to estimate seabed morphology in coastal areas. The paper reviews the main phenomena related to swell waves propagation that allow seabed morphology to be sensed. The linear dispersion is analysed and an error budget model is developed to assess the achievable depth accuracy when Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are used. The relevant issues and potentials of swell-based bathymetry by SAR are identified and discussed. This technique is of particular interest for characteristic regions of the Mediterranean Sea, such as in gulfs and relatively close areas, where traditional SAR-based bathymetric techniques, relying on strong tidal currents, are of limited practical utility.
ABSTRACT
Small autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS) could be used for indoor inspection in emergency missions, such as damage assessment or the search for survivors in dangerous environments, e.g., power plants, underground railways, mines and industrial warehouses. Two basic functions are required to carry out these tasks, that is autonomous GPS-denied navigation with obstacle detection and high-resolution 3Dmapping with moving target detection. State-of-the-art sensors for UAS are very sensitive to environmental conditions and often fail in the case of poor visibility caused by dust, fog, smoke, flames or other factors that are met as nominal mission scenarios when operating indoors. This paper is a preliminary study concerning an innovative radar sensor based on the interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) principle, which has the potential to satisfy stringent requirements set by indoor autonomous operation. An architectural solution based on a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) scheme is proposed after a detailed analysis of existing compact and lightweight SAR. A preliminary system design is obtained, and the main imaging peculiarities of the novel sensor are discussed, demonstrating that high-resolution, high-quality observation of an assigned control volume can be achieved.
ABSTRACT
During the last decade a methodology for the reconstruction of surface relief by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) measurements - SAR interferometry - has become a standard. Different techniques developed before, such as stereo-radargrammetry, have been experienced from space only in very limiting geometries and time series, and, hence, branded as less accurate. However, novel formation flying configurations achievable by modern spacecraft allow fulfillment of SAR missions able to produce pairs of monostatic-bistatic images gathered simultaneously, with programmed looking angles. Hence it is possible to achieve large antenna separations, adequate for exploiting to the utmost the stereoscopic effect, and to make negligible time decorrelation, a strong liming factor for repeat-pass stereo-radargrammetric techniques. This paper reports on design of a monostatic-bistatic mission, in terms of orbit and pointing geometry, and taking into account present generation SAR and technology for accurate relative navigation. Performances of different methods for monostatic-bistatic stereo-radargrammetry are then evaluated, showing the possibility to determine the local surface relief with a metric accuracy over a wide range of Earth latitudes.
