Design of a harmonic radar for Asian hornet tracking

Details

Supervisors

Lederer, Dimitri

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électricien, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enThe yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina nigrithorax) is an invasive species that has propagated in West-Europe over the last two decades. Its presence threaten honeybees as well as wild pollinators. The most efficient control strategy is the destruction of their nests. Unfortunately, these nest are often hidden behind tree canopies or walls. Furthermore, they can go as far as several kilometers from their nest. To overcome these problems, we can attach a tag on the hornets thorax to follow them to their nest. Multiple tracking technologies can achieves this. In this work, we select the harmonic RADAR technology for its very cheap tag. One drawback of this technology is its limited detection range. To palliate this problem, we can mount the RADAR on a drone to closely follow the hornet. This thesis aims at providing a simple harmonic RADAR prototype for testing purposes. At this end, the system equations are developed and a prototype of RF front-end and an antenna are designed. The resulting prototype has an operational range of 8m which is too small for the real application but can be used for experimenting different ideas.