The effective range for controlling Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) is often limited by multiple signal reception caused by multipath fading and signal diffraction. For an Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) this problem creates a safety risk in situations where the landing site is in close proximity to terrain structures. A partial solution is to use multiple antennas on the vehicle. However transmitting from multiple antennas results in the reception of multiple signals that can be interfering or constructive. A new approach, applying Per-Survivor-Processing (PSP), offers the opportunity to achieve dramatic performance improvements (e.g. increased range). PSP excels when the channel characteristics, the number of multipaths, interferers and other key signal parameters are unknown. Application of PSP to wideband real-time stereo video is now feasible due to the rapidly increasing computational power and decreasing price of modern digital technology. PSP algorithms have been developed and simulated for dense urban and rural environments with mobile users under other efforts. The focus of this proposed Phase I work will be to develop Spatial PSP (SPSP) implementation capable of demonstrating high quality UGV command/communications and imagery transmission using multiple transmit antennas during a non-line-of-sight scenario (Ground to ground communications without relay or elevated antennas).
Benefits: The primary benefit of this multi-phased SBIR program is the implementation of high-performance cost effective processing to enhance the range performance for command control and communications with UGVs/UAVs. Robust high data rate mobile wireless communications are called for in a variety of military and commercial situations. Therefore, successful new methodologies that exploit of spatial processing will have significant commercial potential. Areas of application include cellular telephone/cellular data, digital broadcast (television), and the robotic vehicles market (police, heavy).
