Acquisition of Millimeter-Wave Platform for Joint Communication-Radar Signal Design with Applications to Connected Artificial Intelligence

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Modern sensing systems typically utilize multiple networked sensors with communication capabilities including sensing technologies for machine vision such as cameras and lidar, application-specific laser based sensors, GPS, and RF radar transceivers. While conventional radar aims at detecting a relatively small number of distant targets, radar for connected multi-agent AI requires sensing in complex dense urban environments in which a multitude of scatterers at close ranges must be accurately detected. In addition to their ability to sense their environment, connected AI agents require implementation of various forms of communication, positioning, navigation, and timing to carry out a broad range of different tasks, which substantially vary in their latency, throughput, and reliability requirements. Through this Army Research Office grant, the FAU Center for Connected Autonomy and AI acquires reconfigurable computing hardware, high-frequency data converters and radio equipment and builds a first-of- its-kind millimeter-wave bi-directional MIMO platform for joint communication-radar signal co-design in the 71-76 GHz band. The platform uniquely augments the capabilities of the Center researchers and enables new DoD research opportunities, including: 1) robust foolproof spectrum sensing via rapid high-confidence identification of faulty data; 2) jointly optimized waveform co-design for communication-radar systems with multiple transceiver chains; 3) protocol development for directional robotic multi-function networks, among others.