A Synthetic Wide-Bandwidth Radar System Using USRPs

In this paper, we present a synthetic wide-bandwidth radar system using USRP devices. Normally, USRP devices have tens of MHz bandwidth, and cannot generate large bandwidth sweeps to achieve cm level range resolution. By using a synthetic wide-bandwidth approach, we can generate frequency sweeps up to 5 GHz bandwidth and obtain high-resolution range profiles. We will first summarize the mathematical details of the proposed approach, then present a pure Python based solution using the UHD library, and a GNU radio + Octave based implementation, and finally present experimental results for two different test cases. The developed code is available on a public GitHub repo. Compared to the FMCW radars with a voltage controlled oscillator, the sweep time or the experiment duration is longer, but very large bandwidth sweeps can be realized easily by using low-cost USRP devices, and sweeps are more accurate. All of our experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed radar system.