Persistent Airborne Counter Unmanned Aerial System Surveillance

ARTEMIS, Inc. has been supporting radar programs for over 20 years with development, manufacturing, field testing, and deployment support. Our receivers, exciters, and up-converters are a part of Global Hawk, U-2, ASTOR, and others. We design for small size, weight, and power (SWaP) applications on our high-performance SAR and MTI radar systems.  The SlimSDR (Software Defined Radar/RF) system is a highly capable radar, providing active and passive functions, including target detection and tracking with radar and ELINT direction finding (DF). The design is amenable to providing multiple functions without requiring hardware reconfiguration. Further, the SlimSDR is intended to work within an open architecture environment, such as the Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA).  The SlimSDR is a compact (less than 20 lbs.) TRL 7 system, with flight testing and demonstration on multiple aircraft, including small, manned airplanes and rotorcraft (H-60 Blackhawk).We propose that the SlimSDR is the ideal airborne platform to provide extended coverage to detect and track intruding UAS (Groups 1 through 3) and to maintain track while the UAS is pursued to launch/recovery locations.George Mason University’s (GMU) Rapid Prototyping Research Center (RPRC) provides military use-case evaluation, systems engineering, RF engineering, network engineering, data processing capabilities, and modeling and simulation support, as required, to further analyze and contextualize the research performed by ARTEMIS. GMU RPRC has extensive experience in engineering, prototyping, demonstration, and data analysis of complex military systems and will apply that experience to this effort. RPRC has the capability to process unclassified data and data up to TS level. This capability allows us to process real operational data in our Modeling and Simulation work. This Phase I effort will focus on a comprehensive analysis and trade-off study to identify the most promising airborne C-UAS solution for persistent surveillance, specifically leveraging the capabilities of the multi-function SlimSDR. The SWaP-C and system performance of the design options will be evaluated, and the radar system configuration, meeting those constraints, will be defined. Phase II includes building and demonstrating a prototype of the C-UAS system on a UAS or surrogate platform, including performance characterization.  Phase III is for transition of the system to a UAS platform (or platforms) to provide the C-UAS capability for facility protection and airspace monitoring for military and civilian sites.The ARTEMIS/GMU team is ideal for this research and development, with extensive radar and UAS experience from theoretical research, system design, manufacture, production, and real-world operation.