The development of a motion-compensated, vehicle mounted, ultrawideband radar for buried landmine detection

The performance of a vehicle mounted mine detection radar system, developed by QinetiQ, has recently been enhanced by the inclusion of a position and attitude measurement system, using the combination of a differential GPS receiver and an inertial measurement unit. In this paper we present the development of a motion-compensation scheme based upon data from these sensors. Previous to this development, high quality radar images could only be produced from data gathered on relatively flat and even terrain, where uncompensated antenna motion caused by vehicle attitude changes was minimal. However, the new motion compensation scheme has been shown to successfully track the antenna feed positions to within 1 cm accuracy, thus enabling data collection over far more arduous terrain