On the use of SAR interferometry to aid navigation of UAV

This study is aimed at exploring the potentials of SAR Interferometry (InSAR) to aid Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) navigation. The basic idea is to infer both position and attitude of an aerial platform by inspecting the InSAR phase derived by a real time SAR interferometer mounted onboard the platform. Thanks to the expected favorable conditions in terms of geometrical sensitivity as well as signal coherence, the InSAR phase field can be used to derive the terrain elevation. By using both approximated position and attitude values of the platform as well as a reference Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from a mission database available onboard, it is possible to generate a synthetic InSAR phase model to be compared w.r.t. that derived by SAR observations. The geometrical transformation needed to match these two terrain models depends on the difference between position and attitude values derived by the instruments available on board and their actual values. Hence, this matching provides a feedback to be used for adjusting position and attitude. In order to assess the reliability of the proposed approach, we evaluated the interferometric sensitivity to changes in position and attitude. This analysis defines the limits of applicability of the InSAR-based approach and provides indications and requirements on geometric and radiometric parameters.