LAUSR

Unmanned aerial vehicle platforms are ideal for remote life sensing applications including military, humanitarian, and post-disaster search and rescue operations. Doppler radar sensors can remotely detect human respiration vital signs to assess triage but any sensor motion will corrupt the signal. The respiration signal can be recovered by measuring the platform motion with a secondary radar and removing the motion induced phase modulation from the primary radar signal that contains both the platform motion and the desired vital signs signal. We simulated and tested a motion compensation algorithm using the dual radar approach and successfully recovered the respiration signal from the radar sensor using a laboratory testbed and on an airborne quadcopter. We measured a signal to motion interference ratio improvement of 15 dB to 41 dB on the benchtop motion testbed and an improvement of 26 dB for the radar sensor on an airborne quadcopter.