PATUXENT RIVER, Md. -- An engineer at Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system with the potential to teach itself how to recognize and remove external interference from radar signals.
The AI system is an outgrowth of Ph.D. research into pulsars and mysterious cosmic signals called fast radio bursts conducted by the Atlantic Test Range's (ATR) electrical engineer Stephen Itschner.
The technology has the potential to automate a process that is currently time consuming because it is done all by hand. If successful, the system will be integrated into the Advanced Dynamic Aircraft Measurement System, which provides radar cross-section data from aircraft during flight tests.
Radar signals bouncing back from an aircraft can be contaminated with external Radio Frequency Interference or RFI. When plotted on an x-y graph, RFI appears as sharp peaks throughout the radar signal, making it hard to tell what represents the true radar return from an aircraft and what is coming from unwanted external sources.
ADAMS equipment is being upgraded to handle new, more complex aircraft programs that will require far greater data analysis capability. The next step is to buy hardware for the higher processing power needed to train the system for a wider range of radar data. The equipment is expected to arrive at ATR in time to begin running AI training algorithms next month.