Reconfigurable Weather Radar for Airborne Applications, Phase I

Intelligent Automation, Inc (IAI) and its university partner, University of Oklahoma (OU), Norman, propose a forward-looking airborne environment sensor based on active weather radar technologies. The sensor consists of a software-defined radar transceiver, compact dual-polarized array antenna operating in the X-band as well as an integrated RF analog front-end. By leveraging dual-polarization processing, the system will be able to extract atmospheric parameters; thus it will be able to identify and classify the atmospheric conditions as well as local obscurants. The software defined radar transceiver has a Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) component which can easily generate high bandwidth chirp waveforms (bandwidth >=200 MHz) and pulse shaping can be defined digitally to reduce the side-lobes considerably. IAI is currently developing a software defined radar (SDR) platform that can adaptively switch between different modes of operation for radar, by modifying both transmit waveforms and receive signal-processing tasks on the fly. The proposed multi-channel radar technique and the system design will leverage IAI's vast experience in SDR, RF hardware design and antenna design and OU's capabilities in microwave design and field-proven atmospheric hazard modeling and detection algorithm development.

The most promising Non- NASA commercial applications are: Arbitrary wideband waveform synthesizer Reconfigurable radar transceiver with multi-mode capabilities Commercial aircraft collision avoidance and safety High speed digital waveform reader UAV based applications (due to the small form factor and low power). This would include UAV based weather surveillance, target tracking and other commonly sought after UAV radar applications IAI has tremendous experience of designing customized radar assembly and packaging them as field-ready units. Again, if technically the project is successful, we will approach large, established companies in this market segment with the goal of licensing our technology and possible collaboration for Phase II efforts. The proposed technology is built upon the radar design and communications expertise of IAI and our sub-contractors at OU. The most promising commercial applications of interest to NASA are: Weather surveillance Earth science measurements Reconfigurable radar IAI has a long history of successfully designing custom radars for NASA, and most NASA applications could be supported by our reconfigurable radar design.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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