Cognitive Radar for Maritime/Littoral Surveillance

Airborne maritime and littoral surveillance radar is facing a growing set of challenges in contested environments due to ever-evolving adversarial technologies and tactics. In addition to potential new evasive tactics, new sophisticated electronic attack (EA) systems are emerging, which further stress the limits of conventional radar architectures. A new approach is required to regain technological superiority in maritime and littoral surveillance, including Synthetic Aperture Radar/Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR/ISAR), surface target moving target indicator (SMTI) modes, advanced electronic protection (EP), and periscope detection/target ID.To address these emerging challenges, a new and advanced radar concept has been proposed based on a cognitive fully adaptive radar (CoFAR) architecture developed by ISL. It consists of a knowledge-aided (KA) “sense-learn-adapt” (KA-SLA) architecture to achieve unprecedented real-time situational awareness, coupled with fully adaptive radio-frequency (RF) components such as digital arbitrary waveform generators (DAWGs), solid-state amplifiers, active electronically scanned antennas (AESAs), and state-of-the-art (SoA) high-performance embedded computing (HPEC)—including the leveraging of advanced multi-core general purpose graphical processing units (GP-GPUs), and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this project, the CoFAR solution will be extended and applied to the AN/APY-10 family of radars to achieve the first cognitive maritime radar (CMR).