Fully Adaptive Radar - MP 36-14

ABSTRACT:The concept of fully adaptive radar (FAR) seeks to exploit all available degrees of freedom on transmit and receive in order to maximize radar system performance. Of key importance is the concept of closed loop radar operation via feedback from the receiver to transmitter for guiding the next illumination.The first goal of this project is to develop a cognitive radar system definition that identifies key components of cognitive radar, provides formal definitions for those components, and relates them to concepts in cognition.The second goal is to develop a theoretical framework for a FAR system that includes specification of the feedback mechanism from the receiver to the transmitter and specification of performance metrics to assess FAR system performance.The third goal is to develop application-specific models, simulations, and analysis methods to demonstrate and measure the performance improvement achieved by FAR systems over standard feed-forward radar systems.The fourth goal is to demonstrate the real-time operation of a FAR system on a cognitive radar testbed in a laboratory setting.BENEFIT:Radar systems are crucial for robust surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance in all weather conditions and over wide ranges of interest. Most radar systems employ a feed-forward processing chain in which they first perform some low-level processing of received echo data and then pass the processed data on to some higher-level processor, which extracts information to achieve a system objective.The concept of fully adaptive radar seeks to exploit all available degrees of freedom on transmit and receive in order to maximize radar system performance. The application of artificial cognition to radar systems thus offers much promise for improved sensing as well as the creation of new sensing modalities.Research into cognitive systems is currently in its infancy and the results of this project will help define the field.The modeling, simulation, analysis, and experimentation tools developed under this project are quite general.As such, they can be applied to a variety of radar systems for a variety of missions, and can be translated into other domains such as computing, autonomous vehicles, and perhaps even neuroscience and evolutionary biology.The project will develop the fundamental tools necessary to design and analyze a cognitive processing system, and will enable further research in the abovementioned diverse fields.