Adaptive Radio for RObotic Warfare (ARROW)

Robust communication in challenging environment is a constantly challenging task Army faces. These challenges are further exacerbated when unmanned vehicles are operated in urban scenarios with severe multipath due to cluster of buildings along with active transmissions from unfriendly jammers. ARROW houses novel MIMO technology to achieve significant power savings that translates to wide coverage and improved reliability in a practical deployment. Secondly, ARROW will integrate supplementary jammer-resilient adaptive-MANET to corroborate the jammer mitigation at the physical layer. The adaptive-MANET performs cross-layer interaction at the medium access control (MAC) and network layer to perform hybrid MAC and adaptive routing with assured connectivity during poor propagation conditions. With the core objective of jammer avoidance, the MIMO antenna array will be further leveraged (on demand) to localize the source of jamming. The direction-of-arrival of the jammer obtained from the localization module can be fed to the controller which can navigate the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) away from the jammer. ARROW will adopt a modular, reconfigurable software architecture in order to enable renewed operation. The software-defined architecture will allow for seamless future upgradeability. ARROW will be capable of scanning a wide frequency band and dynamic spectrum switching to avoid jamming and interference