Technology Enablers for Layered Sensing

Toyon Research Corporation and University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) propose to develop and demonstrate key technological enablers for effective layered sensing to optimally employ Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) sensors and platforms. A wide variety of new sensor and platform types, along with much of the infrastructure necessary to exploit the resultant data, form a "layered sensing" architecture. We propose to develop technologies that bring together the pieces of this architecture to form a working system, with the ability to acquire, process, analyze, and propagate actionable data, that is effective in a highly dynamic battlespace. This effort will make key advancements in several enabling technology areas: (1) sensor and platform resource management to provide automated routing, mode management, and sensor cross-cueing to optimize the use of available resources; (2) geo-location/geo-registration methods and algorithms to accurately fix objects/events in time and space through knowledge of platform and sensor position, velocity and time; (3) intelligent bandwidth utilization to provide maximum benefit from available communication networks; (4) improved target surveillance and tracking performance, with higher accuracy target position estimates and longer track lifetimes through target handoff between multiple sensors; (5) leveraging phenomenological diversity by fusing radar and electro-optic data into a single tracking system; (6) distributed control algorithms for sensor system self-organizing, to get the best possible information to the right place at the right time; and (7) wind compensation algorithms into UAV resource management to improve performance in extended weather conditions.