Anti-Terrorism-Detection, Indications, and Warnings

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 constitute the deadliest ever foreign assault on US soil. These attacks have drawn attention to inadequacies in the state of preparedness and warning/response capabilities, and have brought renewed urgency to halting the spread on weapons of mass destruction. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) carrying a wide range of communications electronics and sensor payloads can be utilized to provide; rapidly deployable emergency communications capabilities; arrays of sensors that can detect nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) agents; situational awareness information to military, civilian, homeland security, law enforcement, and "first responder" personnel; and forward-based reconnaissance, intelligence collection, and warfighting capabilities to military forces. This Phase II will begin to develop critical technologies for a wide range of payloads that will be integrated into UAVs. In particular, Phase II will utilize the "System-of-Systems" approach to pursue Software Defined Radio (SDR) technologies that will be the communications backbone for the UAV sensor system. It will focus of a VHF (Very High Frequency) communications sensor that will be used for radio direction finding (DF) and interferometry on a UAV platform. This sensor will be integrated with optical sensors and flown on a UAV flight demonstration.