SBIR Phase I: Digital Imaging Radar for Autonomy Infrastructure

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a foundation for unified secure sensing and communication for next generation wireless infrastructure. To ensure the safety and security of scalable commercial drone usage and autonomous driving, a sensor infrastructure is needed to detect, track, and identify fast moving vehicles in urban environments. Existing commercial radars developed for defense applications do not scale for the massive deployment of emerging civilian operation environments. Aura’s digital imaging radar addresses problems that plague the existing radars and offers a solution for this critical infrastructure need. Commercial opportunities include infrastructure security and automation providing situational awareness around airports and industrial sites and next generation wireless infrastructure for unmanned traffic management and connected autonomous vehicles. The technology has the potential to enable new services by integration into vehicles for vehicle safety and autonomous driving. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project develops a real-time system design and simulation platform for novel digital imaging radar. Aura has developed an all digital imaging radar technology for smart infrastructure for autonomous vehicles and unmanned traffic management. Unlike conventional radars relying on Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) waveform or phase modulation (PM), Aura develops time- frequency MIMO radar technology leveraging standard 5G component technology. Aura’s technology provides agile and secure waveform with low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), addressing the operational challenges due to interference, jamming, and energy efficiency. Key challenges for commercialization of this digital radar are system complexity due to wideband data converters and real-time baseband processing. The goals of Phase I project are to complete low-complexity, real-time system design and to validate the performance of the proposed technology in realistic channel environments. Scientific tasks that will be completed in Phase I project include a low complexity system design architecture for real-time implementation of the end-to-end simulation platform with a realistic channel model for performance characterization. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.