FPGA based Radio Frequency Range Finder

Abstract

Drone is used for monitoring atmospheric parameter like temperature, pressure and humidity etc. Location awareness of drone is most important for the controlling and monitoring purpose. Estimation of accurate location and distance is a very critical task. There are various technologies available for finding target location and distance, for example, Radar, Ultrasound, Satellite Navigation and Laser Ranging, etc. These all techniques have some benefits and drawbacks. Radar gives a very accurate location but it needs very expensive infrastructure. Ultrasound technique can not work outside earth because it needs air as a medium to propagate ultrasound waves. Satellite navigation needs very vast infrastructure. Laser range finder also needs line of sight target. This Project discusses new technology to overcomes all these drawbacks. New proposed technique for finding the distance between base station and Drone is described in this project. This proposed new technique is Radio Frequency based Two-Way Ranging method. In this technique, the base station transmits one data packet towards receiver drone. The receiver drone retransmits same data packet towards the base station. By calculating the time difference between transmitting and receiving a data packet, we can calculate distance using time-distance relationship. This Project includes a development of fully supported general purpose hardware and software for the Two-Way Ranging algorithm. Independent modules are designed as per the requirement of the operation of the RF IC. These modules are designed in the Verilog HDL. These independent modules are tested on ISim Simulator and Spartan 3E FPGA with Tektronix Oscilloscope.