Advanced radar models, systems and processing

About the project

About the Project In the last years we have seen how the paradigm of armed conflict has dramatically shifted towards the development of offensive strategies with advanced capabilities and significantly reduced costs. Such threats, deployed effectively in recent conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Middle-East, have demonstrated the vulnerability of existing defence systems, throughout the entire sense, decide and effect pipeline. Of particular interest and concern is how these threats would evolve in the coming years, with a global increase in investment in defence spending and subsequent acceleration in the development of offensive solutions. It is therefore fundamental to develop solutions capable to sense and counter future airborne threats, from low-cost offensive systems employed en masse, to highly capable ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Such systems have already the capability to defeat defence systems, using decoys (overwhelming sensors and interceptors), as well as reaching velocities which compress decision-making timelines and render existing countermeasures impracticable. As these systems will evolve, by developing advanced manoeuvring capabilities, deploying thermal and RF countermeasures and reducing their signatures, it is important to investigate novel solutions capable to mitigate these advances. This project will investigate sensing strategies, advanced algorithms and modelling to counter future airborne threats. The main objectives will be: • Develop a digital twin environment combining airborne threats and sensor models to predict sensor configuration performance for different threats’ capabilities; • Investigate innovative sensing strategies capable to provide enhanced air situation awareness, increasing spatial and temporal coverage. • Develop algorithms capable to boost the sensors’ performance. To assess the capabilities of radar sensing solutions and of algorithms a digital twin environment integrating advanced aerodynamics modelling capabilities from the MAE department with the radar sensing expertise in EEE will be developed. In the digital twin model, the different features and capabilities of the threat could be modelled, allowing the characterisation of the threat from a radar perspective and allowing the assessment of traditional and novel radar sensing solutions. The simulation environment will allow the investigation of system level solutions, such as long range active radars, as well as hitchhiker passive radars that could extend detection range with covertness,for example by using the RF illumination of the Over The Horizon (OTH) radar located in Cyprus to perform passive radar sensing over Europe and Middle-East, or spaceborne communication systems (e.g. OneWeb/Starlink), to perform persistent surveillance. The digital twin environment will be then used to develop advanced detection, localization, tracking and classification algorithms. Additionally, potential countermeasures deployable by the threats will be investigated and characterised in the digital twin environment and the impact on the developed algorithms assessed and potential solutions developed.

Research areas