P.U.L.S.E.: Portable UAV for Life Sign Extraction

This project presents P.U.L.S.E., a portable, low-cost radar prototype designed to support search-and-rescue scenarios by detecting human presence through short-range sensing. Inspired by life-sign radar systems such as NASA JPL’s FINDER, the team built an end-to-end pipeline using an RD-03D mmWave radar module, Raspberry Pi processing, Bluetooth Low Energy communication, and a custom Android dashboard. The system reads radar data, parses position and velocity information, classifies detections, and visualizes results in real time for field-oriented decision support. Although full breathing and heartbeat extraction remains future work, the prototype successfully demonstrates the core architecture for a student-buildable UAV-compatible life-sign detection platform.