A Low SWaP Radar Framework for Aircraft Protection in Airport Ground Environment

Surveillance of airport operations plays a critical role in ensuring the safety of aircraft, people and infrastructures, particularly in complex and highly dynamic environments such as aprons and taxiways. In this context, the increase in global air traffic has led to more congested airports, raising the likelihood of incidents during ground operations and negatively impacting overall airport efficiency, especially in adverse external conditions. To address these challenges, low SWaP non-cooperative sensors represent promising tools to monitor movement and non-movement areas, enhancing situational awareness for pilots and controllers. This paper investigates the use of low SWaP radars in an airport environment for target detection, focusing on the pre-processing steps needed to isolate measurements of interest from spurious ones. The proposed strategies exploit prior knowledge of the airport layout as well as radar-specific operational characteristics. Validation is carried out on experimental data collected at a real airport using compact, off-the-shelf radars during nighttime operations. The achieved results demonstrate effectiveness of radar-based systems in all-day scenarios and their robustness compared to vision-based sensors under degraded visibility conditions.