An Ultra-Wideband Radar System for Through-the-Wall Imaging Using a Mobile Robot

High-resolution imaging through walls and other materials using microwave signals serves amongst other applications in the rapid detection of human maneuvering, rescue missions in collapsed buildings, and target feature extraction. While narrowband Doppler radar in the millimeter-wave or infrared spectrum can provide good resolution through clothing and packaging, penetration through denser sheetrock, plaster, and brick requires operation below 10 GHz; this band however yields poor resolution. As an alternative, Ultra-Wideband radar operating in this band boosts the bandwidth which translates into fine range resolution; still it requires an aperture length of several meters for comparable cross-range resolution. The associated cost and portability in realizing such an aperture through antenna arrays or fixed-length scanners have limited their lengths to the order of 1 meter in prototype systems to date. In this work, we propose a novel aperture taking form as a variable-length scanner or mobile robot. The wide dynamic range of our system coupled with its unrestricted aperture length allows us to generate high-resolution images up to a range of 8 meters or more.