DARPA Bounces Smart Radar Off Buildings To Track Individual Urban Vehicles From the Sky

Tracking from Above It's difficult to use radar in urban environments because of all the structures that get in the way. But by bouncing highly sensitive radar off of buildings' facades, DARPA hopes to lock onto individual vehicles from UAVs and track them through urban streets even when buildings block line of sight. Zemlinki

Radar is great for tracking objects in the wide-open sky or even at sea, but when you try to take it to street level you run into some obstacles -- literally. Radar requires a good line of sight, and obstructions like buildings or terrain features can render radar useless. But now, using a handful of unmanned aircraft and technology that allows them to intelligently reflect radar off buildings, DARPA is developing a system that should be able to track individual vehicles even as they dart between skyscrapers and other structures.

Dubbed Multipath Exploitation Radar, the system works by using buildings as mirrors, bouncing radar off of surfaces to "see" around corners and keep tabs on vehicles even without direct line of sight. First the MER system uses LIDAR -- optical surveying tech that is already packed on many aircraft -- to create a 3-D map of a city. That model of the city allows the system to calculate which reflective angles can best keep an eye on a particular vehicle even when it is obscured by a structure.

Related Articles

	DARPA Wants Roving 'Smart Cameras' That Understand What They See
	Darpa Seeks New Round of Proposals for Universal Biosensor
	Army Seeks Helmet-Mounted Radar to Give Every Soldier 360-Degree Awareness

Tags

Technology, Clay Dillow, darpa, department of defense, lidar, military, radar, unmanned aerial vehicles, urban combat

But MER has some obstacles of its own to overcome before it starts seeing through buildings. The key challenge is maintaining a lock on the target as the radar re-orients itself from line-of-sight to reflection and back, perhaps multiple times very rapidly as a car speeds through urban streets. In the meantime, the ever-ambitious DARPA is looking into developiong an algorithm that would allow MER to track several vehicles in different areas at once.

[New Scientist]