An Arduino Based Short Range RADAR System

Abstract

The applications of the radio detection and ranging (RADAR) systems in military installations as well as scientific and commercial facilities is powered by the ability of the RADAR systems to use electromagnetic waves to determine the speed, range, altitude or direction of objects, either fixed or in motion. In the years since RADAR systems came into prominence, incalculable developments have occurred. Some of these are in the fields of navigation and positioning, target detection and tracking, energy optimization, and other applications. In this research, existing radar technologies are examined and an Arduino based RADAR system is proposed. The advantage of this is to drastically reduce power consumption and allow the designers to have access to a wide range of online communities of Arduino programmers and open source reusable code. The system consists of an ultrasonic sensor, an Arduino microcontroller, a servo motor and a java application for mapping the electromagnetic waves. A prototype system is built by connecting the ultrasonic sensors to the Arduino microcontroller’s digital input/output pins and the servo motor also connected to the digital input/output pins. Both the ultrasonic sensor and the servo motor are then clipped together so that as the servo motor sweeps from right to left through an angle of 180 the servo will rotate alongside it to capture any obstacle that moves in the radar range then send the distance and angle information’s to the pc screen. iv