Radar Sensor Systems​

Our goal is to design and develop microwave and millimeter-wave radar and sensors that have new capabilities for enhanced detection, imaging, and sensing modalities.   We have designed, developed and built the entire ultra-wideband radar system including circuits,  antennas,  data processing, and imaging reconstruction software.   We are also interested in using commercially available radar and sensors in applications.  Our current projects include: 

  1. Software-Defined Ultra-wideband Radar 
    In this project, we are developing and prototyping software-defined ultra-wideband radar systems.  The core transceiver of the ultra-wideband system consists of a wideband software-defined transmitter enhanced by digital pre-distortion algorithms and machine learning and a high sampling-rate programmable receiver.  We are developing individual circuit components, antennas to system integration that includes data collection capabilities and imaging algorithms.   

  2. Millimeter-wave radar for sensing for Vibration and Biomedical Signatures 
    In this project, we are interested in using commercially available millimeter-wave radar for measuring vibration and biomedical signatures. We are developing post-processing software specific for each application, along with employing the use of neural networks for classification problems. The applications are ranging from intrusion detection to human behavior classification. 

Research overview (pdf)
Related publications

  1. A. Alkasimi, T. Shepard, S. Wagner, S. Pancrazio, A.-V. Pham, C. Gardner, and B. Funsten, "Dual-Biometric Human Identification Using Radar Deep Transfer Learning," in Sensors, vol. 22, no. 15, p. 5782, Aug. 2022, doi: 10.3390/s22155782. 

  2. S. Wagner, A. Alkasimi and A. -V. Pham, “Detecting the Presence of Intrusive Drilling in Secure Transport Containers Using Non-Contact Millimeter-Wave Radar,” in Sensors, vol. 22, no. 7, pp. 2718, April 2022, doi: 10.3390/S22072718.

  3. S. Wagner, S. Pancrazio, A. Hossain and A. -V. Pham, "Experimental Detection of Buried Sub-mm Diameter Wires Using Microwave Ground-Penetrating Radar," 2021 IEEE USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting (Joint with AP-S Symposium), 2021, pp. 37-38, doi: 10.23919/USNC-URSI51813.2021.9703496.

  4. S. Pancrazio, P. Nguyen, S. Wagner, A. Hossain and A. -V. Pham, "Digital Pre-Distortion to Correct UWB Pulses in a Boresight Test," 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting (APS/URSI), 2021, pp. 525-526, doi: 10.1109/APS/URSI47566.2021.9704281.

  5. S. Wagner, B. M. Worthmann and A. -V. Pham, "Minimizing Timing Jitter’s Impact on Ground-Penetrating Radar Array Coupling Signals," in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 59, no. 6, pp. 4717-4724, June 2021, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2020.3019976​.

  6. S. Wagner and A. -V. Pham, "Standoff Non-Line-of-Sight Vibration Sensing Using Millimeter- Wave Radar," 2020 17th European Radar Conference (EuRAD), Utrecht, Netherlands, 2021, pp. 82-85, doi: 10.1109/EuRAD48048.2021.00032​.