Detection performance assessment of the FM-based AULOS® passive radar for air surveillance applications

In this paper, we report the latest developments obtained with the FM-based configuration of the AULOS® passive radar system designed by Leonardo SpA for air surveillance applications. Specifically, aiming at improving the target detection capability of the sensor, a robust disturbance cancellation technique is adopted. Moreover, to counteract the time-varying performance of the single FM channel we consider the joint exploitation of multiple FM radio channels. For the purposes, the recent processing techniques developed by the research group of Sapienza University of Rome have been successfully applied. The benefits of the proposed solutions have been extensively tested and validated against both traffic of opportunity and small cooperative targets. The reported results clearly show that the choice of appropriate processing strategies is critical for the performance of the resulting system and the exploitation of effective techniques allows a significant widening of its coverage.