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Using Advanced Radar To Hear Moving Targets
by U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
September 13, 2020
Using an advanced radar, experts at the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory developed ways to detect subtle vibration changes in
moving targets.
Sensing vibrations with a millimeter wave
radar essentially gives radar operators the ability to “hear” what a
target is doing.
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September 8, 2020 - John Jakabosky, an electronics engineer from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Radar Division, tests a millimeter wave radar in Washington, D.C. The division developed a way to sense subtle vibrations and characterize the data in order to “hear” the target’s activities. (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory photo by Leonard Pieton)
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“We’ve taken vibration sensing and what we
are effectively able to do now is use it as a remote sensing
technique for radar. You don’t have to be close and things don’t
have to be still,” said Christopher Rodenbeck, electrical engineer
in NRL’s Radar Division. “For example, many people, both military
and civilian, use radar to take SAR (synthetic-aperture radar)
images of the ground from space. Now we can add sound as another
dimension and know what sound an object in the image is making.”
Millimeter wave radar uses electromagnetic waves between one and
10 millimeters with radio frequencies between 30 and 300 gigahertz,
and has inherently high accuracy and resolution. The lower power
system Rodenbeck’s team used is capable of detecting a one square
meter target approximately 10 kilometers away.
“The ability
to reproduce sound for moving targets using radar is a totally new
first step and we can do it very accurately,” Rodenbeck said. “We
developed these techniques to analyze the motion of moving targets
at long range, which people haven’t done before.”
The heart
of this new radar capability is a new, patent pending algorithm.
Rodenbeck’s team devised the new algorithm to translate the small,
but detectable vibrations from a vehicle into sounds which can be
characterized and measured.
One example of the use of this
vibrometry technique is in parked cars, which could provide
real-time information to drivers of other vehicles.
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September 8, 2020 -
A millimeter wave radar technique developed at U.S. Naval
Research Laboratory can measure vibration and reproduce
sound, even for moving targets like a vehicle at standoff
distances. (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory photo by Daniel Parry)
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In a
published paper, Rodenbeck described how his use of millimeter wave
radar could help identify what other cars are doing in order to
prevent an accident.
“We showed that if the muffler is
vibrating, we can tell if a parked car is on or not. If that car is
about to go into gear, we can detect a strong impulse vibration from
the gear change,” Rodenbeck said. “We can also easily tell whether
the car door is opening or closing. Others have shown that a major
cause of accidents is the misunderstanding about what parked cars
are actually doing.”
While radars have been used in cars for
years, Rodenbeck believes simple software modifications to current
automotive radars would enable safety upgrades in today’s generation
of vehicles and the future fleet of driverless cars.
“It’s
very easy to do this with current integrated circuit technology, so
from a technological standpoint, this is not hard,” Rodenbeck said.
NRL researchers have developed expertise with millimeter wave
technology over decades of work, delivering long-range and robust
target recognition capabilities in air, space, and maritime
environments.
“Millimeter wave radar can see things that
can’t be seen at other frequencies and can’t be seen optically,”
said Michael Walder, superintendent of NRL’s Radar Division. “The
whole objective is to be able to provide more information to an
operator.”
Naval Research Laboratory
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