Weapon-Integrated Cooperative RF

The rapid growth of military capabilities by foreign nations is challenging our technological advantages in many ways. Examples include broad-spectrum, highly integrated air defense systems, next generation, indigenously developed fighter aircraft, and extensive arsenals of ground, surface, and air-launched missiles. These new capabilities require new approaches by the USAF to maintain its technological and tactical lead. In a prior work effort, Matrix developed “Cooperative RF” technology, including new software algorithms and experimental hardware, which we used to successfully demonstrate significant gains in radar signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). SNR gain translates to increased radar detection range, or alternatively, the ability to detect smaller targets at the same range. In that effort we successfully synchronized the clock timing and RF phases to cohere the RF waveforms from N different radars, in the same manner that a phased array antenna coheres the RF phases and time delays of the waveforms at each of its antenna elements. Cooperative RF works on both transmit and receive. Cohere on Receive (COR) is similar to MIMO radars, where orthogonal waveforms from different transmitters are coherently added using matched filtering in a series of receiver channels. This technique alone yields a theoretical SNR gain of N2 for N cohered radars. Cohere on Transmit is a companion approach where identical waveforms are transmitted from N different radars, and the signals are synchronized on receive to improve the received SNR gain by a factor of N3.  This SBIR Phase I proposal will significantly advance our prior work by demonstrating “Cooperative RF” in motion. Specifically, we will extend our work from stationary radars to radars in motion, including equal and different velocity vectors, and various kinds of steady-state and transient accelerations. Our tasks will focus on development of new algorithms that determine the relative positions and orientations of each radar in the team. We will extend our earlier algorithms that computed adaptive weights for RF coherence of stationary radars to handle a team of radars in motion. From these steps we will demonstrate SNR gains on representative weapons platforms, moving independently, in a controlled laboratory environment.  Our tasks also include the design of a Software Defined Radar (SDR) using modular, RF System-on-a-chip (RF SoC) hardware. We will determine the requirements using systems engineering. We will use Matlab-based modeling and simulation to validate our results and predict the range of performance. This design will be fabricated, tested, and used extensively during a Phase II. This proposed effort will open significant opportunities to increase the effectiveness of weapons as autonomous, teamed sensor platforms, while loitering or during an ingressing wave. Successful results in Phase I will set the stage for us to demonstrate “Cooperative RF” in motion in a follow-on Phase II.