Knowledge-aided adaptive radar at DARPA - An overview

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been pioneering the development of the first ever real-time knowledge-aided (KA) adaptive radar architecture. The DARPA KA sensor signal processing and expert reasoning (KASSPER) program has its goal the demonstration of a high performance embedded computing (HPEC) architecture capable of integrating high-fidelity environmental knowledge into the most computationally demanding subsystem of a modern radar: the adaptive space-time beamformer. The heart of the program is an architecture for performing KA/Bayesian adaptive sensor signal processing. Two broad categories of this processing are: Case I- Intelligent Training and Filter Selection (ITFS) and Case II- Bayesian Filtering and Data Prewhitening. The former consists of primarily indirect exploitation of prior knowledge sources, while the latter entails direct filtering of the incoming multidimensional data stream based on prior information.