EAGER: Ultra-wideband mmWave Radar and Imaging Sensors based on Compressive Sensing

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。这项研究的目标是研究实现超低功率、集成、基于脉冲的超宽带雷达和成像传感器的新架构。方法是利用压缩感知进行高速基带处理，在消耗超低功耗的同时实现高动态范围。超宽带、脉冲基雷达和成像传感器需要高速基带处理。基于压缩感知的体系结构利用了接收到的雷达信号中固有结构的存在，特别是其时域稀疏性，在保留信号中包含的信息的同时显著降低了所需的采样率(从而降低了功耗)。这项研究的智力价值在于通过理论和仿真研究压缩感知对实际问题的稳健性，如噪声、干扰、稀疏性不足和电路缺陷(如时钟抖动)，设计并研究基于压缩感知的超宽带雷达和成像体系结构的可行性。这些研究将与用现成部件建造的原型雷达进行的测量联系起来。拟议的研究的更广泛影响在于它有能力改变目前对环境智能的看法。采用压缩传感的硅基超宽带雷达和成像传感器的低功耗和低成本特性可能使大规模传感器网络的无处不在的部署成为可能，这可能对日常生活质量产生巨大影响。这项拟议的研究还连接了集成模拟和数字电路设计、信号处理和应用数学的学科。这项提议将支持研究生研究人员的教育和培训，他们将发展所有这些领域的技能。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The objective of this research is to investigate novel architectures for the realization of ultra-low-power, integrated, pulse-based, ultra-wideband radar and imaging sensors. The approach is to exploit compressive sensing for high-speed baseband processing to simultaneously achieve high dynamic range while consuming ultra-low power.Ultra-wideband, pulse-based radar and imaging sensors require high-speed baseband processing. Compressive-sensing-based architectures take advantage of the presence of inherent structure in the received radar signal, specifically its time-domain sparsity, to significantly reduce the required sampling rate (and hence, power consumption) while preserving the information contained in the signal. The intellectual merit of the proposed research is to devise and investigate the feasibility of compressive-sensing-based ultra-wideband radar and imaging architectures through theoretical and simulation-based studies of the robustness of compressive sensing to practical issues such as noise, interference, presence of insufficient sparsity, and circuit imperfections such as clock jitter. These studies will be linked to measurements performed with prototype radars constructed with off-the-shelf components.The broader impact of the proposed research is in its ability to transform the current vision of ambient intelligence. The low-power and low-cost nature of silicon-based ultra-wideband radar and imaging sensors utilizing compressive sensing potentially enables ubiquitous deployment of massive sensor networks, which can have a dramatic impact on the quality of day-to-day life. The proposed research also bridges the disciplines of integrated analog- and digital-circuit design, signal processing and applied mathematics. This proposal will support the education and training of a graduate student researcher, who will develop skills in all these fields.