Facilities

The ARS Group has a radiofrequency laboratory with measurement instrumentation for the characterization of systems and subsystems up to 110 GHz. There is also an anechoic chamber for the measurement of antennas in the near field that allows measurements up to 110 GHz. There is also a bank of optical assembly usable for testing millimeter systems up to 100 GHz using quasi-optical techniques. The group has an electronic prototyping laboratory, equipped with a maskless lithography system for ultra-precise microwave circuit fabrication. Also, a mechanical laboratory equipped with a CNC milling machine is available.

The following radar sensors are developed in the research group,

  • GBSAR RiskSAR: Two instruments for the generation and reception of radar signals using CW-FM radar with 1W of transmitted power, in two frequency bands, 9.65 and 17.5 GHz, with bandwidths of 100 MHz and 200 MHz respectively. Swath of 2 km with resolution in distance of 2 and 1 m respectively and in cross-range, mounted in the 2 m linear motion unit, of 6m and 3m at 1000m distance. Accuracy in detecting radial displacement around 1 mm and 0.5 mm respectively.

  • GBSAR for HydroSoil campaign: A full-pol SAR system at 5.6GHz, with a range resolution of 75cm.

  • GBSAR @ 94GHz: Instrument for the generation and reception of radar signals using a CW-FM radar at 94 GHz. Transmitted power of 100 mW and transmission bandwidth of 1.5 GHz. Swath of 300 m with distance resolution of 15 cm. Accuracy in detecting radial displacement around 10 mm.

  • ARBRES: ultra-compact radar sensor at 9.65GHz with similar features to RiskSAR at 9.65GHz. Weight less than 2.2Kg and volume of 6dm3, shippable on miniUAV platforms.

  • TERAHEALTH: a 120GHz coherent doppler radar for measuring and characterixzing vital signs.


The SUBSIDENCE-GUI software package is also available for differential interferometric processing of data from commercial orbital SAR sensors: ERS, ENVISAT, RADARSAT-2, ALOS-PALSAR, TerraSAR / TanDEM-X, Sentinel 1A / B, Cosmo-Skymed and PAZ. It can also be used to pre- and post- process data, like co-registration of the dataset to the geometry of a master image, back-geocoding of ancillary data to radar geometry and geocoding of results to UTM coordinates.

The group has a cloud computing service on a cluster of multi-node DELL blade servers, with an associated distributed data storage service based on the highly scalable GlusterFS system, with an interconnection network multiple with 10 gigabit Ethernet technology based computing system. In addition, a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Platform is actually being mounted. It will consist of 10 servers connected at 40Gbps. The high-computing environment will have 11 GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) with a total of 43.512 cores and a computing capacity of 138.5 Tflops, as well as 13 CPUs with 232 cores and capacity for 464 threads, 2.880 GB of RAM and 345 TB of storage capacity