Cognitive Radar for Maritime/Littoral Surveillance

Modern maritime surveillance radar and RF sensing is facing a growing challenge when operating in contested environments. A plurality of advanced threats and tactics is rendering traditional radar/RF architectures obsolete. Future operations will require far greater flexibility and adaptability to regain the strategic advantage. In this project, a new cognitive maritime surveillance radar (CMR) architecture is being developed that will provide unprecedented flexibility to meet emerging challenges. CMR builds on the pioneering work in cognitive fully adaptive radar (CoFAR) being developed by the Air Force for other operations. A basic introduction to some unclassified elements of CoFAR can be found in the book “Cognitive Radar: The Knowledge-Aided Fully Adaptive Approach, Artech, 2010”. CMR consists of a fully-adaptive (both transmit and receive) radar architecture that implements a “sense-learn-adapt (SLA)” cognition engine that allows for optimized reaction against new threats and scenarios. CMR is designed to dovetail as a block upgrade to the multifunction, multimodal, maritime radar (M3R) architecture being developed in a companion project.