MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers honored with best paper awards

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have earned best paper awards at major conferences on radar technology and air traffic management.

Radar technology
Dr. Gregory L. Charvat and John E. Peabody of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Aerospace Sensor Technology Group, and Dr. Tyler S. Ralston, an MIT affiliate, garnered the award for best paper presented at the 2010 Tri-Service Radar Symposium, a specialty forum of the Military Sensing Symposium held last year in Tampa, Florida. Their paper, "A Through-Wall Real-Time MIMO Radar Sensor for Use at Standoff Ranges," discussed the development of an ultrawideband (UWB) multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) phased-array sensor that has real-time acquisition and processing capability and provides video-like synthetic aperture radar images of people moving behind a concrete wall.

"Many of the more than 50 papers at the symposium were on much larger and longer-term government radar programs," says Charvat. "Our project was a small effort funded by the Laboratory's Advanced Concepts Committee."

The Tri-Service Radar Symposium is focused on radar technology applied to military and homeland security problems. The symposium covers the full spectrum of radar techniques and all aspects of radar technology from signal processing, phenomenology, analysis and modeling, component technologies to net centric systems and electronic countermeasures and countercountermeasures.

Air traffic management
Dr. Mykel J. Kochenderfer, James P. Chryssanthacopoulos, and Dr. Roland E. Weibel of the Laboratory's Surveillance Systems Group received the Best Paper Award in the Separation category for the paper "A New Approach for Designing Safer Collision Avoidance Systems," presented at the 9th USA/Europe Air Traffic Management R&D Seminar, held this year in Berlin, Germany. The paper discusses an approach for automatically deriving robust airborne collision logic from encounter models and performance metrics. Investigation of the approach was driven by the anticipated need to modify the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System's (TCAS) logic to accommodate the introduction of next-generation air traffic control procedures and surveillance systems. TCAS is currently mandated worldwide on all large transport aircraft.

The Air Traffic Management Seminar is a highly selective conference sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration and EUROCONTROL (the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation) to foster collaboration between U.S. and European researchers working in air traffic management.

Posted July 2011

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