Advances in radar systems for modern civilian and commercial applications: Part 1

Radar was developed during World War II for defense and security applications, and it was initially used for detecting aircrafts and missiles, replacing short range and narrow field-of-view acoustic devices. Since then, radar use has been progressively wid-ened to numerous civilian applications, including airport and harbor traffic control, remote sensing of Earth, wave forecasting and marine climatology, high-precision detection of small surface movements, biomass and deforestation measuring, and volcano and earthquake monitoring. More recently, it has includ-ed car cruise control and collision avoid-ance, monitoring of heartbeats and respiratory function, physiological liq-uid detection, and monitoring of artery walls and vocal cord movements, with devices that, thanks to the progress of the technology, can in some cases be even smaller than a modern smartphone. Today, the use of radar-like sensors is getting more and more pervasive, and the future will likely see radar as a ubiq-uitous sensor, devoted to applications completely unexpected when it was used for the first time