Ground-penetrating radar-based underground environmental perception radar for robotic system

In recent years, the environmental perception technology for robotic system has attracted a lot of attention from researchers, but only a little of studies on environmental perception technology are focused on the space underground. Meanwhile, in the field of mobile robotic systems, with the development of research on underground emergency hedging and buried targets’ high-resolution fault imaging, more and more attention has also been paid to underground environmental detection and perception. This article proposes a ground-penetrating radar-based underground environmental perception radar (UEPR) for mobile robotic system indoors. The underground environmental perception radar can achieve noncontact and real-time perception, which helps people detect buried targets and get the image of targets more conveniently and precisely. Major contributions of this work are threefold. Firstly, a stepped frequency continuous wave modulation and demodulation scheme is proposed; secondly, a switch device for a six-channel antenna array is designed and contributed; thirdly, based on a linear antenna array and a signal processing platform, the underground environmental perception radar is supposed to achieve three-dimensional imaging in underground space indoors with its low power consumption. For the experiment of three-dimensional imaging on the copper box and underground environment indoors, the process of imaging is successful, although the size of them is a little bigger than the real size. In addition, the comparison experiment shows that the resolution of underground environmental perception radar system is similar with that of sound wave methods, and the working range of underground environmental perception radar system is deeper than the others. It can be concluded that the underground environmental perception radar can detect the copper box underground and perceive something special within 1.5 m depth.