Metron, Inc. has received a $2.1 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Strategic Technology Office to help develop compact radar systems.
Under the Beyond Linear Processing award, Metron will experiment with new, nonlinear and iterative signal process approaches to create radar systems that are lighter, smaller and more cost effective than their predecessors, the Reston, Virginia-based company announced on Tuesday.
“Metron is proud to be supporting DARPA’s efforts to deliver cutting-edge innovations for next-generation radar solutions,” said J. Van Gurley, president and CEO of Metron.
“We are pleased to continue our collaboration with DARPA to deliver innovations that enable greater capabilities for the operating forces,” he added.
The BLiP project is divided into two phases, the first of which includes the development, analysis and evaluation of end-to-end radar signal-processing chains in a software test bed that allows end-to-end detection, localization and tracking for multiple targets in complicated environments. Metron will work alongside Duke University and Azure Summit Technology to deliver algorithms, theoretical analysis and the software testbed for this first stage of evaluation.
Phase 2 centers full-scale field implementations, and will use an operational civil radar for real-time testing. During this portion of the process, Metron will work to transition the testbed prototype into a high-performance computing implementation using GPU computational hardware for field testing.
“We are excited to provide our team’s technical expertise in the areas of sensing, signal processing, tracking and software development to accelerate DARPA’s goals for the BLiP program,” stated Dr. Kristine Bell, a distinguished fellow at Metron.
She said that improvements in radar system performance enabled by advanced signal processing and high-performance computing will pave a path for the use of smaller radar packages across air, sea and land applications.
