Polarimetric Ultra-Wideband MiMo-Radar for IED-Detection and High-Resolution ImagingAcronym: MEDICI-POLARIs

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Decades of guerilla warfare in Colombia have left behind a deadly legacy of thousands of landmines. In what could be a new start for Colombia, in 2016 the bloody civil war which raged intermittently for five decades was finally brought to an end. A long hoped-for peace agreement was signed between the government in Bogotá and guerilla group FARC. Prior to this, over 220,000 people were killed in conflicts between state security forces, left-wing rebels, and right-wing paramilitaries. Millions of people were also driven from their homes. Colombia now has the chance to improve its economy, political culture and human rights and perhaps also rehabilitate its murky image abroad. But for the people of Colombia, everyday life is still marred by danger. The country is still peppered with landmines from the armed conflict with the guerilleros. The applied project “MEDICI-POLARIS” is one of two follow-up projects of “MEDICI”, which was funded by DFG and Colciencias between 2014 and 2017. The main objective of MEDICI-POLARIS is to investigate a method, which is able to improve the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) for GPR operation. In order to increase the SCR, and to eliminate the overlaying surface reflection, an adaptive radar system, which performs an automatic re-arrangement of the wave radiation direction to an optimal incident angle, is investigated. The optimal incident angle, with respect to a realistic ground, will be investigated in EM simulations and test measurements. Since the knowledge of the effective soil permittivity is inevitable, contact free soil permittivity estimation methods will be also investigated. In order to make the optimized GPR concept applicable for field measurements, a new GPR system will be evaluated and a MIMO-demonstrator will be built. Two GPR scans, which are performed with novel M-Sequence radar front ends that are also part of this project, are necessary. The data of multiple scans are used for soil permittivity estimation and improving the SCR. Since considerable calculation power is needed for the radar imaging, a wireless data connection to a backbone computing system will be set up in order to keep the front-end device lightweight. Additionally, an innovative dielectric waveguide soil permittivity sensor will be investigated, which delivers initial soil permittivity values for the imaging. The soil sensor will be also driven by an M-Sequence radar. Since humanitarian demining operations are an important task within the peace process in Colombia, governmental and non-governmental organizations like “HALO-Trust” will support this project by evaluating the investigated systems in actual mine –contaminated areas. Moreover, findings of the MEDICI projects will be directly included in the RADAR lecture, which is hold every year by the German partners in Colombia in order to guarantee a sustainable education of Colombia’s next generation engineers.