A Rotating Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Concept for Robot Navigation

This paper introduces a concept for robot navigation based on a rotating synthetic aperture short-range radar scanner. It uses an innovative broadband holographic reconstruction algorithm, which overcomes the typical problem of residual phase errors caused by an imprecisely measured aperture position and moving targets. Thus, it is no longer necessary to know the exact trajectory of the synthetic aperture radar to get a high-resolution image, which is a major advantage over the classical holographic reconstruction algorithm. However, the developed algorithm is not only used to compute a high-resolution 360 2-D image after each turn of the radar platform while the robot is moving, but also to calculate the relative residual radial velocity between the moving radar scanner system and all targets in the environment. This allows us to determine the exact velocity of the robotic system on which the radar scanner is mounted, and thus to obtain the exact radar trajectory, if there are stationary targets like walls in the environment.