Star-Shaped Wheel for Mechanical Micro-Doppler Modulation

This letter investigates the possibility of using deliberated geometries for rotating targets, which may improve the detectability and classification by means of its micro-Doppler signature. Beyond the signature provided by the rotation rate of the target, every particular geometry leads to specific and unique modulation waveforms that increase the information related to this target. Different star-shaped wheels with particular geometries have been designed demonstrating different reflection characteristics and modulation waveforms. The signature of these rotating star-shaped wheels has been measured in an anechoic chamber using a general-purpose 24 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar platform and a detection algorithm based on the derivative of the cross-correlation is proposed to validate the proposed approach.