Metamaterials-Enabled Ultra Low C-SWAP Radar for Commercial Airborne Sense And Avoid
(Room 275-276)
04 May 16
11:00 AM
-
11:30 AM
Tracks:
Air, Commercial, Research and Development, Technical Track: Sense and Avoid Technologies
This focus of this session is how a new class of metamaterial-based electronically-scanning radars (named MESA: Metamaterial Electronically Scanning Array) solves several of the outstanding challenges in creating commercially viable ABSAA sensors for autonomous systems – especially small ones. MESA is capable of providing many (though not all) of the capabilities of active phased-array radars, but at orders of magnitude lower cost and at a fraction of the weight and required power. In particular, MESAs offer the ability to electronically scan a narrow, high-gain beam over a wide field of view (+/- 55degrees in Azimuth and Elevation), including track-while-scan modes and steradian-prioritization that no mechanical/gimbaled system can accommodate. (Even if mechanical systems could do these things, they’re too slow, bulky and heavy to be a good solution for smaller UAS ABSAA) We’ll briefly review the operational requirements for ABSAA, as collected from primary and secondary sources including the RTCA and UAS manufacturers, and discussion of strengths and weaknesses of different sensor types (e.g. lidar, webcam, EOIR) currently available for ABSAA. The bulk of the talk will be discussion of the operational performance of a MESA FMCW-radar designed specifically for ABSAA on commercial platforms. We present the high-level specifications of this system, and use a detailed MATLAB model (time-domain behavioral model) to investigate the resulting detection metrics against various objects/obstacles and in various environmental conditions. Some treatment will be given to the basics of the MESA architecture and the key differences that enable reduced price compared to other imaging radars such as phased-arrays, though the primary focus of the talk is on MESA as a proposed solution to key parts of the ABSAA problem.