TM-UWB Active Hit Avoidance

As smart anti-tank weapons become more lethal, active protection and hit avoidance systems become increasingly important. These systems must detect targets with very small cross-sections, have large operational ranges, and near zero false alarms, thus making threat detection very complicated problem. The fundamental advantage of TM-UWB radar for hit avoidance application is that single pulses are generated and detected rather than long series of cycles, thus extremely low probability-of-detection and high sensitivity are achievable. TM-UWB has many other advantages including size, cost and power, resistance to jamming, ability to perform electronic beam forming and beam steering. In this Phase II research, Intelligent Automation, Inc. (IAI) together with its subcontractor Time Domain Corp. (TDC) will develop a prototype sensor based on TM-UWB radar and also design advanced signal processing algorithms for threat detection. Our system offers the following significant advantages: 1) portable and low cost; 2) able to detect projectiles moving at velocities up to 253 m/s at 500 m (and be scalable to detect higher velocities and larger ranges); 3) can estimate the speed of the projectile and its direction. Our Phase I results have clearly demonstrated the feasibility of our proposed approach. However, substantial algorithmic and hardware development work is still needed.