CIF: Small: Improving Sensing and Estimation with Co-array Techniques

探测目标及其到达方向在雷达、声纳、天文学、地震学和无线通信等领域起着关键作用。在接收机被动传感仅对截获信号进行分析的情况下，在所谓自由度度量的理论极限指导下，由N个物理传感器组成的均匀线性传感阵列最多可识别N - 1个目标。设计高自由度传感系统可以从根本上推动传感、检测和估计领域的发展，提高传感、检测和估计系统的容量。这一进步有助于支持对国家安全和经济至关重要的各种应用和服务。本项目旨在开发主动传感的一些基本技术，以显着增加自由度度量，并有助于许多应用所依赖的传感，检测和估计的进步。研究者将把项目材料纳入本科和研究生课程，并将促进代表性不足群体的参与。这项工作分为两个主要重点：1)开发一种基本的有源合成共阵，可以利用MIMO雷达和共阵原理的同时使用，超越单独使用任何一种技术的传感限制；2)设计一种新型的两级高级稀疏阵列几何结构，充分利用主动合成共阵方法，将两级不同阵列几何结构灵活集成，在满足不同阵列结构的各种应用需求的同时，可将自由度提高4个数量级。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Detecting targets and their direction-of-arrival plays a key role in the areas of radar, sonar, astronomy, seismology and wireless communications. In the case of passive sensing with a receiver to just analyze signals intercepted, a uniform linear sensing array with N physical sensors can identify at most N - 1 targets, guided by the theoretical limit of the so-called degree of freedom (DoF) metric. Designing a sensing system with high DoF can fundamentally advance the field of sensing, detection and estimation, by increasing the capacity of such systems. The advancement is instrumental to support various applications and services that are important for national security and the economy. This project seeks to develop some fundamental techniques for active sensing to significantly increase the degree-of-freedom metric, and contribute to the advancement of sensing, detection and estimation that many applications depend upon. The investigator will incorporate the project materials into both undergraduate and graduate courses, and will facilitate participation from under-represented groups.The work falls into two major thrusts: 1) Developing a fundamental Active Synthetic Co-array that can exploit the concurrent use of principles of MIMO radar and co-arrays to surpass the sensing limit from the use of either technique alone; 2) Designing a novel two-level advanced sparse array geometry that can take full advantage of the active synthetic co-array method and flexibly integrate different array geometries in the two levels to increase the DoF up to four orders while meeting various application needs with different array structures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.