Build your own drone tracking radar [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igrN_wd_g74

by outrun86 • 2 years ago

119 26 2 years ago

FredPret• 2 years ago

I love things like this. The guy is currently on episode 2 / 5 on this radar thing.

Drones have the potential to really become a cool real-life e-sport over time. It'll even be a direct analogue to modern combat, much like early sport was.

showerst• 2 years ago

I’ve been following these as he releases them; just a quick warning that he’s using a $2,500 radar module that’s often backordered. It’s an awesome tutorial but definitely in “serious hobbyist” territory if you want to follow along for real.

ranger207• 2 years ago

Yeah I've been reading about radar recently and this popped up at the perfect time, so I was excited to have a tutorial to building my own... until I saw the price tag. Once I have some time though I'm going to look into the MIT cantenna radar mentioned in the first video

emusan• 2 years ago

If you're interested in the cantenna radar you might also find Henrik Forsten's radar interesting: https://hforsten.com/6-ghz-frequency-modulated-radar.html. It uses largely the same high-level design, but is a bit more integrated as a single unit (rather than a series of minicircuits components).

I've built the MIT radar before and it is a great way to learn the basics of radar!

In either design you can likely get away with <$500 worth of materials.

Henrik has follow-up blogs adding and modifying this design for more functionality, it's a pretty neat project to follow!

gonesilent• 2 years ago

KrakenSDR had to pull its radar software due to ITAR.

syedkarim• 2 years ago

Passive radar is ITAR-controlled. Terrestrial (non-airborne) active radar is not controlled, in many cases.

burningion• 2 years ago

Have been using TI’s AWR1443 for mmWave radar development. It’s a bit less pricey than the board mentioned here at ~$300. The software stack is a bit rough though. You can buy another board for $700 to stream raw radar data out for analysis. https://www.ti.com/tool/AWR1443BOOST

corethree4• 2 years ago

There's a market in smaller militaries for stealth hobbyist-level drones. This type of tech is a game changer for military applications that don't have large budgets. I would imagine you start out R&D for such things with this type of radar.

holoduke2• 2 years ago

The market is not limited to smaller militaries. As we can see in the Ukraine war both sides are using tens of thousands of cheap 500 dollar fpv drones. Those are by far the most successful new warfare tech introduced in a new war. All the existing expensive drones and also expensiven AA proved to be quite worthless compared to cheap drones.

corethree4• 2 years ago

it is limited to smaller militaries. Mainly because the "bigger military" I'm referring to doesn't purchase commercial products. They purchase from specially vetted and procedure following "defense contractors" that charge a 100x premium.

They'll never be using such a product. Russia is not a "big military" not when China spends 4x as much as them. And China is a small military too, they spend around 4x less then the next biggest military. You'll have to guess what I mean by "smaller militaries" from these details I've provided.

05• 2 years ago

I think the real game changer is using consumer smartphone grade SoCs for visual based nav+target guidance. The same $500 drone that can navigate through a GNSS denied environment and target a person, that's scarier than manually flying them one by one trying to beat signal jamming. Oh, and they scale better - no operator needed.

chasd00• 2 years ago

I’m assuming visual based nav is more sophisticated than terrain following systems like cruise missiles use right? I would imagine these days drones can read and follow road signs to the general area and then loiter while using facial recognition to find their target.

corethree4• 2 years ago

I've work on these "secret" systems in anduril. I can tell you all about it, even the secret parts because nobody really gives a shit.

Most companies aren't using SoCs here. They use Nvidia Xavier's and radar. Vision is for record keeping, it's mostly a joke to use it to trigger some counter uas thing. Its like a bird triggering a missile launch. Vision isn't reliable enough... Similar to how like an LLM isn't reliable enough.

All of these systems can easily be overwhelmed by a cheap small cluster of drones. No system will react fast enough to bring down say 10 drones.

A stealth drone will give a solved problem of getting past counter uas with an even cheaper solution. That's all I'm saying here.

Actually a phalanx might have a shot at bringing down 10 drones. But it won't do this consistently and each bullet costs probably around 20 drones.

ducktective• 2 years ago

So without an array of camera systems in some indoor environment, drone research is a non-starter right?

And I assume the IMU route or Radar-based approaches can't provide sub-centimeter accuracy...

krisoft• 2 years ago

without an array of camera systems in some indoor environment, drone research is a non-starter right?

No, that is not right. For practical reasons many people working on control algorithms for multicopters do use facilities like you describe.

The indoor nature helps managing risk to third parties and decouples your experiments from the weather. Many experiments are helped by an external ground truth localisation data, and camera based systems are relatively cheap and relatively simple way to achieve that.

That doesn’t mean that multicopter flight control is the only thing worth researching about drones. Nor does it mean that every possible experiment requires a sub-centimeter external pose tracking solution.

btreecat• 2 years ago

Having specific XP with counter sUAS systems, radar is unlikely to be a working solution given the range, speed, size, and cross sections were talking about for a realistic deployment.

Fun idea but likely not going to handle the the claimed use case.

Build your own drone tracking radar [video]

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