Students and faculty in the Department of Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering are some of the more prolific researchers in the Embry-Riddle family. The department's research expenditures are nearly one-half those of the entire College of Engineering, with support from federal agencies including NSF, FAA, and NOAA as well as industry partners. The department is heavily involved in projects managed by ERAU's NEAR Lab and by the COE's Eagle Flight Research Center.
Strategic department research directions include three areas critical for the future of aerospace. These are:
- Detect and avoid technologies for unmanned aircraft systems;
- Assured systems for aerospace, including cybersecurity and development assurance;
- Modeling and simulation for aviation and aerospace.
Detect and avoid technologies enable unmanned aircraft systems to "see and be seen" by other aircraft and by air traffic controllers on the ground. Of particular challenge is detect and avoid of uncooperative aircraft, those aircraft that aren't equipped to announce their position either automatically or in response to interrogations from the ground.
Assured systems are those that are robust in the face of cybersecurity challenges, with assured development being system design approaches that yield assured systems without high overhead.
Modeling and simulation for aviation involves everything from the logistics of getting passengers onto aircraft to planning how to get all air traffic around predicted bad weather without upsetting arrival times and locations.
The S-Band Array for Bistatic Electromagnetic Ranging (SABER)
Faculty in the Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering Department at Embry-Riddle are developing new radar that may alter the paradigm of locating aircraft.
Unlike standard radars that generate high-power radio pulses and listen for the return echoes indicating aircraft, the SABER system has no transmitter of its own. Instead, the researchers use weak echoes of signals from existing satellites high above the Earth to locate their quarry.Passive radars exploiting environmental signals are not uncommon and systems using television and radio stations have been known for more than a decade; however, systems using satellites are unique. Satellite signals are much weaker than ground-based signals, and are often considered too weak to be useful. The key, says Barott, is in the signal processing, which is able to identify the very weak echoes - and thus the aircraft - among the sea of radio noise and interfering signals.
Passive radars exploiting environmental signals are not uncommon and systems using television and radio stations have been known for more than a decade; however, systems using satellites are unique. Satellite signals are much weaker than ground-based signals, and are often considered too weak to be useful. The key, says Barott, is in the signal processing, which is able to identify the very weak echoes - and thus the aircraft - among the sea of radio noise and interfering signals.The researchers envision many applications for passive radars using satellite-based signals. To start with, a network of inexpensive stations could supplement existing systems for tracking low-altitude aircraft, and provide coverage in mountainous regions where little radar coverage currently exists. “It's a similar idea to why you might get satellite television,” says Barott. “Remote locations and rough terrain might block ground-based signals, but are no problem for satellites sending their signals down from orbit.” Other applications include rapid deployment radars and approach radars for remote airfields. The researchers also note potential applications utilizing the covert and stealth-detecting aspects of this type of radar
Researchers
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- Department
- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept
- Degrees
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Ph.D., M.S., Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus