Improved landing radio altimeter for unmanned aerial vehicles based on an antenna array

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used in various applications such as civil and military surveillance, law enforcement, and support in natural disasters as well as in hazardous environments. Approaching and landing are necessary steps for all UAVs, indicating that radio altimeters are needed. In this paper, a radio altimeter based on an antenna array is proposed. Our solution allows some improvements over the traditional radio altimeter such as more precise altitude estimation, ground imaging without the need of side looking radar, mapping the obstacles positions and detecting the ground inclination and topology. Another important contribution of this paper is a review of traditional radio altimeters along with a performance comparison between the level-crossing detection and the digital signal processing frequency detection - which is based on the fast Fourier transform algorithm.