Contents
Introduction
Example Simulations
Documentation
Contact
Download
Introduction
FERS is the Flexible, Extensible Radar and Sonar Simulator. It aims to
simulate the behaviour of next generation radar and sonar systems. FERS
has been under active development since March 2006, and is neither
feature complete nor fully tested. The example
simulation shows off some of it's features and capabilities.
FERS supports:
- Continuous Wave and Pulsed Radars
- Multistatic and Monostatic Radars
- Networked Radars
FERS is under development as part of an ongoing project at the Radar Remote Sensing Group,
part of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town.
What FERS Does
FERS takes an XML description of a scene, with one or more
transmitters, one or more receivers and zero or more targets. Using the
parameters (such as sample rate, carrier frequency, etc) defined in the
XML script, FERS generates the waveform that the receivers will see.
FERS works with any arbitrary number of receivers and transmitters
(monostatic and multistatic), works with continuous wave and pulsed
radar systems, and can simulate a radar using any pulse shape. The
simulator currently simulates the amplitude, phase, Doppler and noise
effects of a radar system. Simulation of other channel effects (such as
multipath, fading, scattering, etc) is currently being considered.
Example Simulations
Currently Implemented
Features
- Modeling of multistatic and monostatic radar systems
- Support for pulsed and continuous wave systems
- Support for passive radars and beacon systems
- Loading of arbitrary pulse signals from a file (eg generate
your pulses in MATLAB or IDL and simulate with FERS)
- Simulation of Radar and Sonar Systems
- Export of simulation results to CSV and HDF5 files for
easy import into MATLAB, IDL, Excel or whatever rocks your boat
Features That Will Be
Implemented Soon
- Documentation (really, really soon)
- Exporting what the receiver actually gets, rather than one
file per response (nearly done, coming soon)
- Continuous wave support for arbitrary waveforms
- Clock propagation between remote radar sites, effects of
jitter, etc.
- Support for wideband pulses
- A decent GUI (nearly done, coming soon)
- Modeling of multipath, fading and other channel effects
- Import of pulses from HDF5 files
Features That May Be
Implemented in the Future
- Support for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems.
Documentation
FERS currently includes nearly no documentation, except for the DTD for
the XML script format and a Latex file of equations I have used.
The only other currently available documentation is the example simulation.
I plan to remedy this situation as soon as possible.
Download
FERS is licenced under the GNU GPL. You can download the latest FERS
release from the FERS Sourceforge page, where you will find both source and Debian packages.
Contacting
the Authors
FERS is currently being developed by Marc Brooker and Professor Michael Inggs at the University of Cape Town.
Return to UCT Radar Remote Sensing Homepage.
