A Passive Millimeter-Wave Sensor on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

At present, detecting unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) under all-weather and all-day conditions remains a challenging and actively studied problem. In this paper, a novel passive millimeter-wave sensor mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed for ship detection at sea, with particular applicability to USVs. The proposed sensor offers advantages in terms of low hardware complexity, reduced signal processing requirements, and low cost. A dual-band passive millimeter-wave sensor operating at W-band and D-band is introduced, together with the corresponding passive millimeter-wave imaging modes. Airborne experiments are conducted to demonstrate that ships at sea can be effectively detected using the proposed passive millimeter-wave sensor deployed on UAVs. Experimental results further show that ships with high contrast can be reliably detected by the proposed sensor.