Welcome to the UCL Radar Research Group Wiki Page

The aim of this wiki is to share information on the research that is being carried out in the group both internally and externally.

Thanks for dropping by.

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There is a radar phenomena coined “Ring Angels” by Eric Eastwood which describes the effect of early morning. His original paper on the matter can be found here :https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.1962.0042

Below is a link to a slide which has an image of the effect: ring_angels.pptx

A 2-year project that the sensors and circuit group at UCL have been involved in, has come to an end with successful results and promising roadmap for the future work. Dr Amin Amiri and Prof Paul Brennan worked on the Phased Array Gateway and Satellite Tracking project in collaboration with three other companies. The project outcome showed a successful adaptive combining of antenna elements for simultaneous coherent transmission and reception of satellite signals at Ka-band.

The UCL sensors and circuits group recently visited Edinburgh for the 2019 EMSIG event. Posters were presented by the RAs and PhDs and Alvaro Arenas Pingarron won an award for the PhD poster competition. See the photos below!

1) Phased Array Gateway 2) Development of a UHF Transponder and Radar for Geological Monitoring of Boreholes Drilled Through Ice Sheets

Novel transceiver architectures for automatic target recognition in UAV-based SAR systems

RFSoC Multi-function RF Exploitation

A novel symmetric phase difference 4-legged antenna for subglacial probe applications

UWB HF Antenna Design For ApRED Ice Penetrating Radar

Antarctic Ice Shelf Tomography with Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar

18/12/18

The UCL Radar group recently attended successful NeXtRAD trials in South Africa. These trials were aimed at deploying 3 radar nodes along the coastline in South Africa to capture data of drones, boats and calibrations spheres as well as sea clutter measurements across a number of bistatic angles. This work was supported by researchers at University of Cape Town, the Institute of Maritime Technology (IMT) and CSIR.

19/06/18

Some team members recently attended a Microlocal Analysis (MA) applied to real-world imaging problems workshop at the Alan Turing Institute organised by Dstl. The first day focused on how MA could help with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image formation and processing. Below is an image of Dr. Francis Watson presenting for Dstl on the topic of SAR.

15/06/18

Some members of UCL Radar group recently visited the RAF Museum in North London. This was a great visit for the team and one that was well timed in the 100th year for the RAF. Below are some photos from the visit.

25/05/16

The UCL-Birmingham Inter-University Symposium was held at Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire. As the two top universities in the UK for radar research it was decided to hold a joint symposium on the latest research projects on-going at both universities. The posters session was then followed by a team bonding event which all the PhDs and Postdocs were made into teams competing against each other. In the evening over dinner and a quiz the winners of the poster session were announced:

• 1st Ben Willetts
• Joint 2nd Veronika Yordanova
• Joint 2nd Qingchao Chen

Over all it was a fantastic event and all who attended really enjoyed it. Here are some photos to prove it!

12/04/16

The most recent seminar given to the Radar Group is now available on the YouTube channel. This was given by Dr. Bo Tan on the subject of “Interpreting Human movements with indoor RF”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtUg2_1Y5EE&feature=youtu.be

01/04/16

We have two new uploads to the Radar Group YouTube channel today. One is from Dr. Matthew Ritchie and another from Mr. Yu Liu a PhD student within the radar group.

Dr. Ritchie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXCchgliIOg&feature=youtu.be

Mr. Liu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XvjBJpmbq8&feature=youtu.be

Dr. Ritchie speaks about recent experiments performed using the NetRAD radar system looking the radar signatures from micro-UAVs and birds. This work is part of a collaboration with FFI, Norway and preliminary results will be published at the IEEE Radar conference 2016.

The second seminar is on the topic of Wireless Mesh Network security and covers typical attacks and counter-attack methods within these types of networks. 19/02/16

Todays seminar was given by Federico Lombardi. He presented some recently obtained results from measurements of different models of landmines and explained the key features seen in the data. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT6bYjuoJ9c&feature=youtu.be

26/01/16

Today at UCL Prof. Hugh Griffiths, Dr. Matthew Ritchie and Dr. Francesco Fioranelli were privileged to host VIP visitors from Dstl, US DoD, ONR-G and US Army research, including Mr. Stephen P. Welby (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering). The guests were introduced to some of the innovative research that UCL is currently working on ranging from multistatic radar sensors, wind turbine measurements, human micro-Doppler, micro-Drone and through wall radar experiments.

10/12/15

A paper presenting results on personnel recognition based on micro-Doppler signatures collected by multistatic radar has been published as a featured contribution in the latest issue of Electronic Letters (volume 51, issue 25). This research work is being carried out by Research Associates Dr Francesco Fioranelli and Dr Matthew Ritchie, with Prof Hugh Griffiths, and it uses the multistatic radar system NetRAD developed here at UCL. The work shows highly promising results in the use of features to recognise different people from their individual walking gait, which can be successfully captured by radar sensors and analysed. Potential applications include recognising individuals and in determining whether or not they may be armed.

Links to the featured article and to the actual paper can be found below:

http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/el.2015.4071

http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/el.2015.3513

30/11/15

Last week, Matt Ash completed the installation of Geodar HD at the Vallee de la Sionne avalanche test site in Switzerland. The phased array radar will operate autonomously throughout the winter recording naturally occurring avalanches in the valley. The aim of the project is to improve our understanding of avalanche dynamics through high resolution radar measurements. The radar was developed by Matt, Mandana Ardeshir-Tanha, and Paul Brennan and funded by EPSRC.

15/10/15

Dr Amin Amiri from the radar group visited the Imperial War Museum (http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-london) in London in order to take RCS and dielectric measurements of real landmines (de-activated of course). This is part of the continued Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and de-mining projects within the UCL Radar group. Below are some images of the mines that were measured

11/09/15

Today's seminar was given by Dr. Francesco Fioranelli on the subject of “Experimental analysis of multistatic multiband radar signatures of wind turbines”. It can be seen here:

https://youtu.be/ZUoNEO5-BCk

28/08/15

Today's seminar was given by Dr. Matthew Ritchie on the subject of “Countering Micro-UAVs using Micro-Doppler and Multistatics”. It can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjC1UElUGrQ&feature=youtu.be

31/07/15

Mark Davies recently gave a IEEE AES Society presentation to the Radar group on the topic of FOPEN (Foliage Penetrating Radar).

28/07/15

The recent Friday seminar was given by Federico Lombardi and the presentation is now available on the UCL Radar Group Youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEggaVnVZLw&feature=youtu.be

24/07/15

Recent through the wall experiments were performed at the Shenley trials site by the UCL Radar Group and the Crime Science department. For these experiments both an active and a passive radar system were used to evaluate the detection of individuals walking in a house. Successful detection of both single and multiple people as well as their Doppler characteristics were measured. Below is an image of the active radar system, Soprano, deployed outside of the house wall.

02/07/15

Successful NetRAD trials were completed yesterday looking at multi-static human micro-Doppler and at Micro-Drone detection. Below is an image from the trials taken from the drone platform

See a video here of it moving:

https://youtu.be/pGQd1FUs8ek

24/04/15

Todays seminar was given by Veronika Yordanova on the subject of Intelligent Adaptive Underwater Sensor Networks. Click the link to watch the seminar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBMBuP4Hk7Y

09/04/15

An interesting through wall radar setup developed in a “Garage”. Phased array systems can be complex radars mostly used in military applications, but this system was developed on a low budget and had very good results.

http://hackaday.com/2015/04/07/build-a-phased-array-radar-in-your-garage-that-sees-through-walls/#comments

27/03/15

Todays seminar was given by Hashir Sherwani and was titled “Towards Cognitive Radar Networks Quantitative Comparison : Bistatic vs. Monostatic”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA2lDcYuqNM&feature=youtu.be

20/03/15

The Soprano Radar system was recently used as part of the Royal Institution Engineering Masterclass session at UCL. The system was used to demonstrate a real working radar system and the Doppler phenomena to some London school children.

http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/undergraduate/royal-institution-engineering-masterclass

20/03/15

Todays seminar was given by Dr. Nial Peters who is visiting from Cambridge University. It was the first seminar that was filmed for the Radar Group YouTube channel. Please follow this link to see the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQVOKFMi0dE&feature=youtu.be

16/03/15

Researchers Dr. Matthew Ritchie, Dr. Francesco Fioranelli, Dr. Matt Ash and Dr. Kevin Chetty were involved in an education outreach project with the Royal Institute on Sat 14th March. School children from various London schools attended a session at UCL where they learned about interesting engineering projects at UCL.

The UCL-developed Soprano radar, funded by a grant from the Institute of Making, was used in the session to explain radar principles and the Doppler effect to the school children. The children were able to see the radar running in real time and interact with it, observing detections and Doppler signatures of themselves and a UAV. The whole session received great feedback and more demonstrations of the sensors, systems and circuits group research are now planned for the future.

03/03/2015

Congratulations to Dr. Matt Ash & Prof. Paul Brennan who have been interviewed regarding their recent Electronics Letter publication in the IET titled “Transmitter noise considerations in super-Nyquist FMCW radar design”.

Interview: http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/el.2015.0560

Electronics Letter: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7047403

26/02/2015

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Daventry Experiment, in which Watson Watt and Wilkins demonstrated the detection of an aircraft target by radar.

Below is an extract from the paper “Detection and location of aircraft by radio methods”

(27 February 1935) ‘Let it be assumed that the typical night-bomber is a metal-winged craft, well-bonded throughout, with a span of the order of 25 metres. The wing structure is, to a first approximation, a linear oscillator with a fundamental resonant wavelength of 50 metres and a low ohmic resistance. Suppose a ground emitting station be set up with a simple horizontal half-wave linear oscillator perpendicular to the line of approach of the craft and 18 metres above ground. Then a craft flying at a height of 6 km and at 6 km horizontal distance would be acted on by a resultant field of about 14 millivolts per metre, which would produce in the wing an oscillatory current of about 11⁄2 milliamperes per ampere in sending aerial. The re-radiated or ‘reflected’ field returned to the vicinity of the sending aerial would be about 20 microvolts per metre per ampere in sending aerial. … If now the sender emits its energy in very brief pulses, equally spaced in time, as in the present technique of echo-sounding of the ionosphere, the distance between craft and sender may be measured directly by observation on a cathode ray oscillograph directly calibrated with a linear distance scale, the whole technique already being worked out for ionospheric work at Radio Research Station. …’

09/02/2015

Our close collaborators the University of Cape Town recently hosted a short conference on Maritime SAR course. Here is a link to the notes which includes some videos of the presenters.

http://radarmasters.co.za/marisar-2015/marisar-2015-programme/

Matt Ritchie

14/11/2014

Prof. Hugh Griffiths recently visited Croatia to see a real landmine field. This work is part of a project investigating novel Ground Penetrating Radar techniques for mine detection, in collaboration with Cranfield Defense Academy. The project is funded by the “Find a Better Way” charity (http://www.findabetterway.org.uk/) which was set up by Sir Bobby Charlton. Below are a couple of pictures from the visit.

29/10/2014

IET video of Prof. Hugh Griffiths discussing the A F Harvey Award.

External Link

20/10/2014

The IEEE International Radar Conference “Catching the invisible” took place in Lille, France, in October 13-17. The conference saw contributions from 33 countries and more than 255 published papers from all areas of radar research.

The UCL Radar Group contributed to the conference with a numerous attendance and with 10 presented papers covering a wide range of the research projects carried out in the group: low and high grazing angle sea clutter analysis (Dr. Matthew Ritchie and Prof. Hugh Griffiths), passive Wi-Fi radar applications (Dr. Bo Tan and Prof. Karl Woodbridge), bistatic and multistatic radar (Dr. Matthew Ritchie, Dr. Francesco Fioranelli, Prof. Karl Woodbridge, and Prof. Hugh Griffiths), FMCW radar for imaging avalanches (Dr. Matthew Ash), reflectivity analysis of oil sand terrain (Maurice Ezeoke), radar tasks scheduling (Dr. Vincent Jeauneau), micro-Doppler radar signatures of large sea birds (Børge Torvik, external PhD student from FFI Norway), and bistatic tomography using digital television broadcast (Daniel Sego, external PhD student from Boeing).

Congratulations to Dr. Matthew Ritchie who won the Robert Hill Award as co-author with Prof. Simon Watts and Dr. Luke Rosenberg of the paper “Characterizing the Doppler Spectra of High Grazing Angle Sea Clutter”. The award recognizes the outstanding quality of papers co-authored by researchers working in organizations from different countries.

- Dr. F. Fioranelli

24/06/2014

A few members of the Radar group visited Dr. Alessio Balleri at Cranfield Defence and Security (CDS) (https://www.cranfield.ac.uk/about/people-and-resources/schools-and-departments/cranfield-defence-and-security/) at the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. A few images from the trip are shown below

20/03/14 Radar in the News

Prof. Hugh Griffith is interviewed on Sky News regarding using maritime Reconnaissance radar to find the missing Malaysia flight MH370.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/missing-plane-debris-found-060541050.html

17/01/14 Welcome to the group

Boerge Torvik has joined the UCL Radar group for a 6 month period starting in Jan 2014. He is an external PhD with Prof. Hugh Griffiths and is normally based in FFI (Norwegian defence research establishment) in Norway, where he has been working with non-cooperative target recognition related topics in operational radar systems operated by the Norwegian air force.

His PhD is in the area of bird detection and identification in modern surveillance radar systems with the aim of differentiating these animals from small UAVs which they could easily be mistaken for.

- Dr. Matt Ritchie

17/01/14 - Matt Ash' Trip to Antarctica

Matt Ash is current away on experiments in freezing Antarctica! He is keeping a blog on the expedition and has uploaded some photos. The reason for the trip is to measure the thickness of the ice shelves of a glacier using a radar system developed at UCL with BAS (British Antarctic Survey). The radar was developed by Dr. Lai Bun Lok under the supervision of Prof. P. Brennan.

http://www.drmattash.com/

- Dr. Matt Ritchie

30/09/13 - 02/10/13

A recent NATO SET 185 group meeting occurred in Salon-de-Provence, France. This is a research discussion group on medium grazing angle clutter. The meeting has representatives from many nations and includes industry, academia and government associates. The aim of the group is to share ideas, techniques and data regarding medium grazing angle clutter and produce a consensus on this characteristics or areas that required further study.

Here is an image of ONERA's light weight powered glider they use to collect radar data.

- Dr. Matt Ritchie

09/09/2013 - 12/09/2013

The IEEE International Radar Conference took place in Adelaide, Australia. The conference's theme was “ BEYOND ORTHODOXY: NEW PARADIGMS IN RADAR”. There was many interesting papers from all areas of radar research. The conference itself was opened by a Prof. Hugh Griffiths giving a keynote entitled “Where Has All The Spectrum Gone?”. It was good to meet a UCL Radar group alumni Dr. Waddah Al-Ashwal while in Adelaide. He is currently working as a postdoc researcher at Adelaide University in the area radar research.

- Dr. Matt Ritchie

23/05/2013

Prof. Hugh Griffiths speaks to Radio 4 regarding his A F Harvey award

“Radio for radar Professor Hugh Griffiths, the winner of the Institution of Engineering and Technology's A F Harvey Prize, is receiving his prize tonight - £300, 000 to continue his work on bistatic radar and using FM radio waves and TV signals as radar. He joins Quentin Cooper in the studio.”

20/05/2013

Congratulations to Dr. Matt Ritchie and Dr. James Brown who passed their PhD vivas last week with only minor corrections. Matt is continuing his work at UCL as a research associate on the enigma that is sea clutter. James now works for DSTL as a radar scientist but hopes to maintain links with the UCL radar group through his work on airborne passive bistatic radar.

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