Multipath Exploitation Radar Program
Program Manager: Dr. Joseph Durek
The Multipath Exploitation Radar program will extend the reach of airborne sensor platforms beyond Line-of-Sight (LOS) limits by peering deep within the shadows of urban canyons. The range of current sensors in urban environments is limited by LOS blockage due to buildings. This forces the sensors to very high aspect angles to avoid shadows, and severely reduces the coverage area they can persistently monitor.
However, much of the radar energy blocked by buildings is actually reflected back into the street below. This multipath energy provides an opportunity to reduce the shadows of the urban environment and extend the sensor reach by allowing a much lower aspect angle, and therefore greatly extend the persistent area coverage of an airborne sensor. The ultimate goal of this program is to provide surveillance over a large urban terrain like Baghdad with a small handful of airborne platforms.
The Multipath Exploitation Radar concept will enable cost effective wide area urban surveillance with relatively few platforms by utilizing known multipath propagation between buildings into the urban canyons below.
This program will exploit the benefits of multipath to not only improve visibility into the urban environment but also to extract distinctive signatures of targets in the urban landscape that will result in improved detection, localization, and tracking of targets in the urban environment.
