Creating large orbital radar antennas is astronomically expensive. We demonstrate how a swarm of 20 synchronized lightweight drones creates a distributed synthetic aperture with millimetric ground resolution.
By locking swarm local oscillators to within 350 picoseconds using distributed UWB time transfer, radio pulses transmitted by one drone can be coherently processed by receiving antennas on neighboring drones, synthesizing an aperture 100 times larger than any single airframe.
Field tests demonstrated the ability to penetrate dense forest foliage and reveal buried infrastructure with 5-centimeter volumetric resolution, validating the distributed radar concept.