Implementation of interference mitigation techniques for L-band radiometers on-board Unmanned Aerial Systems

Abstract

Drones are taking the world into a new phase of advanced technology. It makes the execution of tasks run way more faster. Allowing remote sensors to fly in a drone helps many sectors, but with that integration, comes a lot of challenges, and the major one is mitigating interferences. William Thomson Kelvin, the British scientist, said: ``I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.¿¿ Measuring becomes an art when its used for a purpose. Remote sensing allows the characteristics of different materials to be measured in a rapid and non-destructive way, potentially over large areas in a short time. Balamis have developed lightweight, mobile L-band radiometers suitable for different vehicle mountings - aeroplane, ground vehicles and UAVs. DroneTools, provided the UAV for this project, which acted as a source of the interferences needed to work on. In order to achieve the goal of this project, multiple software programs were developed to run between the workstation and the radiometer. Each step added in any software was tested in a field campaign to read and analyse the results obtained for further improvements. The main steps of this project were to first start by the background research as it was very important to have enough knowledge about the challenges ahead. The second step was to collect data by the radiometer and to identify the interferences on the workstation. The third and fourth step were done almost simultaneously to mitigate the interferences both using the workstation and in real time as the data is read by the radiometer. The plan was to tackle the topic using one mitigation process, but as the project moved on, another process was added with a short comparison between the way used to run each software and the results obtained.