Posts Tagged ‘radar’
This Robot Can Hear Your Frightened Breathing, Even Through Walls
The Cougar20-H, manufactured by California-based TiaLinx, is the latest iteration in a series of sensor systems employing the company’s fine beam ultra-wideband (UWB), multi-gigahertz radio frequency (RF) sensor array (we’ll call it UWB RF). Its earlier Eagle5-N was a tripod-mounted radar that could detect breathing and monitor heartbeat through walls. An army grant then led to the development of the Cougar10-L, which essentially mounted the Eagle5-N on a small, remotely controlled robot.
But the Cougar10-L had to be very close to a given wall to “see” through it, making it less nimble and more obtrusive during stealth operations. So last week the company rolled out the Cougar20-H, boosting the radar’s power so it can sense through walls from a distance.
As David Axe points out, though the Army funded the Cougar20-H’s “enhanced situational awareness,” the robot's minimal mobility limits its military applications.
For search and rescue operations or standoff situations, though, such a robot could be indispensable (for instance, it could locate living but incapacitated persons trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building). It also could find applications in monitoring border traffic, not only scanning vehicles for signs of human trafficking, but also for detecting underground tunnels used by smugglers of both human and material cargoes.
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3-D Map-Making TanDEM-X Satellite Returns First Images, Showing Fine Detail of Earth’s Surface
The German satellite is in excellent health and ready to team up with the TerraSAR-X satellite to create the most precise world maps ever made, .
TanDEM-X's first images show the runways at Moscow's airport; a cubist-looking grid of forests and fields in Ukraine; and the difference between choppy and calm waters off Madagascar.
The spacecraft is flying over Earth at roughly 4 miles per second, and will join its partner satellite in a tight dance by this October.
The duo will bounce microwave pulses off Earth's surface and time the return signals, allowing them to map the entire land surface of the planet in extreme detail. TerraSAR-X has already mapped the surface within an accuracy of about 30 feet. The tandem satellites should be able to map the variation in height of the Earth's surface to within about six and a half feet.
This digital elevation information could enable military jets to fly ultra-low, or it could help relief workers spot damage wrought by natural disasters.
The satellites will orbit in a complicated dance that brings them within 700 feet of each other. They'll start making 3-D maps sometime in January, and it will take about three years to create a seamless map of the globe.
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Gallery: Mapmaker Satellite TanDEM-X’s First Images
TanDEM-X will help create the most accurate 3D maps yet
DARPA Bounces Smart Radar Off Buildings To Track Individual Urban Vehicles From the Sky
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.
Using Ku-band radar, the MER is sensitive to even slight differences between similar vehicles, ensuring that the target car isn't lost in the mix of traffic even when the signals are bouncing off of buildings. That's a key component of MER that can't fail if the system is to work in crowded urban environments. And it will have to; DARPA thinks that once a LIDAR model of a city is made, MER can cover a swath of terrain more than 600 square miles in size.
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.
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