Research Areas

1. Research Areas • Sensor and Decision Fusion • distributed control and sensing applications • sensor network design, implementation and control • Mobile communication • physical test-beds (e.g., SWAT) • real time protocol design (e.g., SAPIENT) • Radio Frequency Communication • software defined radio prototyping and experimentation • electrically reconfigurable antennas • antenna design and evaluation • link adaptive OFDM modulation • Communication Network Modeling • for tactical purposes and for engineering design • including an OPNET group

2. Sponsors • Military • U.S. Navy • Office of Naval Research • Naval Research Laboratory • U.S. Army RDECOM • CERDEC - Applied Communication and Information Networking program • ECBC - Edgewood Chemical Biological Center • National Security Agency • Information Assurance Scholarship Program • Government • DARPA (SAPIENT, SPEYES) • National Science Foundation • Computer and Information Sciences Engineering Directorate • Engineering Directorate • Industry • Lockheed Martin (reverse engineering, handheld-device network, COMPOSER) • National Instruments • Texas Instruments • Analog Devices • Aeroflex

3. CREW Project Overview • Counter-RCIED Electronic Warfare (CREW) systems counter the threat from radio controlled IEDs by enabling jamming in response to detected threats • Fast Feature Extraction • constraints imposed by jamming make feature extraction challenging • developed techniques for feature extraction under time window constraints • Threat Detection • developed algorithms that analyze the RF environment and makes a decision as to the probability of threat • the output of the threat detector also provides rationale for threat identification

4. Profile HMM Threat Sequence Detection and Location

5. SAPIENT Situation-Aware Protocols In Edge Network Technologies April 2010 – January 2011 • Goals: • To evaluate solutions for reliable communication in highly constrained networks. • To consider bandwidth, latency, loss, and connectivity constraints. • To consider a heterogeneous network: satellite, tactical radio, WiFi, and WiMax connections. • Sponsored by: • Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs (ATL) • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

6. SAPIENT Project Accomplishments • Comprehensive literature survey: • Current state of the art in reliable communication over constrained networks • Solutions constrained to those operating above the Transport Layer • Performance testing: • Conducted tests on a two-host network test-bed connected via a link emulator. • Performed extensive performance testing of the DoDWAN Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) implementation • Characterized DTN performance under varying bandwidth, loss, and latency constraints • Provided results for various sizes of data payloads

7. Snake Robot Path Planning Computer rendering of the snake robot A modular, snake-like mobile robot created for motion planning and analysis The snake robot is intended to crawl like a centipede over, around and through obstacles. With the increased flexibility offered by the snake-like structure comes the task of coordinating the motion of a large number of joints.

8. Snake Robot Path Planning The snake’s kinematic structure is described in terms of standard geometric links and joints. The forward kinematic model relates the snake’s joint angles to its overall shape. The snake is made to assume the shape of a path curve by fitting its modules one after another.

9. Computer-Guided Rocket Design and construction of a guided rocket for use in analysis of rocket stability and control. First controlled amateur rocket to integrate a strapdown inertial navigation system Achieved inertial measurement unit (IMU) drift of <0.1m/s for flights less than 10 seconds.