Concept of Distributed Radar System for mini-UAV Detection in Dense Urban Environment

In recent years, with the increasing prevalence of mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (mini-UAVs, also called drones), there is an impetus to detect and monitor them in dense urban environment. However, the conventional radar which is generally mounted on the rooftop may not be able to detect drones in the urban canyons (i.e., streets between buildings) because the radar line-of-sight is often blocked by the buildings. To solve the problem, a novel concept is proposed in this paper, which uses distributed low-cost Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) radars to detect the small drones and create continuous coverage in highly urban environment. Such low-cost distributed radars can be mounted on the facades of buildings or the street lamp posts to save the space and are able to detect and classify the drones against other targets, such as vehicles, bicycles, walking persons, and birds etc. that are very common in urban area.