Ultralow cost and size radar for AAM enhanced mobile weather station

The emerging AAM market presents a new infrastructure need not addressed by today’s commercial sensors or existing infrastructure. Today’s infrastructure provides remote sensing of the atmosphere largely above 10000 ft. Deployed radar networks, NEXRAD, were configured to support long range forecasting and severe weather alerts. Wind speed sensing is achieved using high-cost LiDAR sensors; however, these become ineffective with low visibility and precipitation. Agile RF Systems (ARS) (through extensive customer discovery) has identified three critical sensors to facilitate safe and efficient AAM operations. These are a wind profiler implemented at S-band to reduce size and cost, a cloud radar implemented at Ka band for high sensitivity and small size, and a precipitation radar capable of high-speed volumetric observations to 20 km under heavy rain. Each radar type, ARS has architected sensors that enable low recurring cost with high reliability to ensure a long useful life. The wind profiler is a conventional phased array implemented using very low-cost commercial parts and is built to be modular and scalable. The cloud radar is a traditional 2-axis gimballed dish based on high reliability consumer appliance direct drive mechanisms and solid-state active feed to maximize transmit power at very low cost. The precipitation radar applies 2D AESA breakthrough technology. This radar is implemented at C-band using commercial parts and mounts to a common azimuth rotator assembly used for the cloud radar. Low cost is assured by the low-cost Software Defined Radio proven adequate in Phase I for all three sensors. The BOM for each sensor is about $10K in quantity. The financial path to commercialization is minimized by building on investments to date by USAF in ARS for our Portable Weather Radar product software and technology innovations demonstrated on past SBIR funding. Functional prototypes for each are planned in Phase II with outdoor comparison testing with TruWeather.

NASA is delivering data to guide the industry's development of electric air taxis and drones and to assist the Federal Aviation Administration in safely integrating these vehicles into the national airspace. NASA is actively assisting development of drone based applications such as wildland fire and methods to monitor air traffic. These efforts by NASA will set the stage for a flourishing industry by 2030. The Agile RF Systems sensor suite compliments the NASA objective to develop tools and techniques that contribute to air traffic safe operations with the emerging AAM market space. Ideally, the wind profiler will be deployed at every vertiport site providing operators with comprehensive knowledge of wind speeds potentially impacting takeoff and landing as well as flight efficiency. Each cloud radar deployment would provide volumetric observations of local weather conditions as changes occur (out to 10 km and prior to precipitation). These observations would be ingested by nowcasting services to provide 30 minute to several hour advanced notice of significant changes in weather patterns. Our industry partners providing transportation managers with accurate forecasts impacting logistics (ground and air) want to know wind, visibility, clouds and precipitation everywhere all the time. This makes our precipitation radar, the final compliment to the sensor suite, essential. The precipitation radar will sense out to 20 km radius and complete volumetric scans to quantify wind and precipitation throughout the boundary layer as well as monitor airborne hard targets. The cloud and precipitation radars are in the 20 inch diameter class making these easily redeployable and mobile. The wind radar is roughly 50 inch diameter and 10 inches tall making it compatible with mobility and relocation. Each sensor easily runs off wall outlet power sources and compatible with local power generation. Did you know there are over 19,000 airports in the USA and 336 incorporated cities with populations greater than 100,000? With only 159 NEXRAD radars covering the US, this means much of the US infrastructure is lacking severe weather observational tools, in particular in the boundary layer of ground to 10,000 ft. Most flight incidents occur at takeoff and landing. So, low altitude and short range radar observations would be extremely beneficial to improve flight safety, especially as we expect to see a substantial growth in flight operations with the emergence of AAM. Customer discovery talks with Loveland Airport, Colorado and Amarillo, Texas International Airport managers has confirmed the vast majority of airports have zero weather radar resources. The suite of sensors identified by Agile RF Systems for Phase I investigation have each been confirmed as capable of providing accurate observations with an extremely low cost. This means our airports and pilots can access modern information currently only available to aircraft with on-board radars. Between civil aviation and municipalities wanting their own tools to make accurate, real time boundary layer weather observations for traffic management there is an extremely large, underserved radar market. Observation networks worth mentioning are SNOTEL and Mesonet weather sensing networks. SNOTEL is an automated system of snowpack and related climate sensors operated by the USDA. There are over 900 snow telemetry sites in 11 states. All SNOTEL sites measure snow water content, accumulated precipitation, and air temperature. The Oklahoma Mesonet is a world-class network consisting of 120 weather stations mounted on 10 m towers monitoring a variety of weather parameters to aid in characterization of meso-scale weather events in Oklahoma. By bringing to market ultra-low cost remote sensing, the information gathered by distributed networks can radically improve knowledge of climate conditions with volumetric observations.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.