Multi-Frequency Lidar/Radar Integrated System for Robust and Flexible Doppler Measurements

A new architecture for an integrated fully coherent radar-lidar system based on a single mode-locked laser is proposed and demonstrated. The lidar exploits a multi-frequency optical signal with tunable tones separation allowing a dynamic tradeoff among robustness and sensitivity of measurements. The radar that is based on photonics technologies employs the mode-locked laser for generating the radio frequency signals in the X-band and Ku-band, simultaneously with the lidar. Velocity measurements for different tones separation are demonstrated with good agreement among the values measured with the lidar and radar.