A Secondary Surveillance Radar with Miniaturized Transponders for Localization of Small-Sized UAVs in Controlled Air Space

This paper presents a concept study of a novel, compact secondary surveillance radar for localization and identification of small-sized, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in controlled air space. For high-precision localization, a UAV can be equipped with miniaturized backscatter transponders like it is common practice in civil and military aviation. They further allow transmitting arbitrary data to the surveillance radar which can be used for friend-or-foe identification. To demonstrate the concept, a 24 GHz multichannel radar system is used in combination with a appropriate transponder based on the switched injection-locked oscillator (SILO) concept. We show a measurement to estimate the position and radial velocity of a small quadrocopter UAV. The presented system results from the project VaMEx-LAOLa, where a local ad-hoc localization and landing system for UAVs is developed.