A High Efficiency Gyrostabilizer Antenna Platform for Real-Time UAV Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Motion Error Compensation

A gyro-stabilized antenna platform could implement a real-time motion compensation for a SAR system. Since motion errors reduce during the data acquisition process, post-processing load also reduces. Subsequently, production of well-focused, and high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is conceivable. The research is to design a gyro-stabilized SAR antenna platform that compensates motion in real time during data acquisition. This paper explains the study of undesired motion (error) for typical UAV SAR. The resulting angle ranges of yaw, pitch, and roll describe the magnitude of the motion errors. The design of a gimbal system as a stable antenna platform considers yaw, pitch and roll range parameters. IMU optimization (Complimentary Filter, and Madgwick Filter algorithms are tested and compared in order to decide the optimum optimization scheme for the antenna platform. The data fusion and gradient descent algorithm from Madgwick show significant performance. The implementation of the optimized IMU algorithm and control on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) has resulted in a very effective stable antenna platform.