Submitted Abstract
Emerging applications like autonomous vehicles or sensing for airborne devices such as drones mandate enhanced situational awareness of the complex dynamic environment from radar sensing systems. Dynamic environments naturally require radar systems to be adaptive, where in they update their operational parameters to enhance situational awareness within the interrogation environment. This project intends to explore and implement software-reconfigurable radar systems to incorporate such adaptation. This calls for adaptive radar processing techniques and software-reconfigurable hardware platforms. Novel radar processing algorithms for complex scenarios, drawing upon advances in signal processing, are being investigated in literature. AWARDS aims to leverage on these developments to enhance existing radar concepts through development of adaptive waveforms and receiver processing, as well as strategies for their adaptation to the current scenario efficiently. In particular, the outcomes of receiver processing are used update the transmit waveform parameters to improve illumination of target scene and enhance situational awareness; this is a significant departure from traditional radar systems. Concepts like MIMO waveform design and compressive sensing will be explored to enhance target detection, discrimination, and tracking. Concurrently, the advent of FPGA modules supporting high sampling rates, and higher instantaneous bandwidths coupled with miniaturization of RF ADC/DAC modules and antenna elements have led to development of mmWave Radar technology solutions at the 76-81GHz band. In fact, several mmWave COTS radar modules supporting software reconfigurability of the system including waveforms and receiver processing are available currently. These platforms will be used to set-up a validation test bench in close collaboration with our industrial partner, IEE S.A., Luxembourg and a selection of adaptive waveforms will be implemented. This in-lab validation at mmWave bands lends order to the research initiatives and triggers prototyping and commercialization activities.