SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Distributed beamforming is an enabling technology building on over a decade of research that has the potential to create novel capabilities in mission areas such as communications, radar, and electronic warfare. However, software and hardware designs are typically application-specific with a limited user base and minimal support for third-party development. This creates a barrier to exploiting the technology for Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and private sector domains. Meanwhile, commodity devices represent a computing platform with a rich set of processing and sensing capacities that are continually upgraded at commercial timescales, making them an attractive and ubiquitous target for hosting beamforming applications. Synoptic Engineering proposes to develop the Commodity Coherent Effects Toolkit (CCET), which enables beamforming and other coherent applications to be hosted on commodity devices. This toolkit will create a “tinkerer’s sandbox” allowing exploration of many coherent effects applications including transmit beamforming, precision ranging, precision time-sync, and emitter localization. Coherent effects using acoustic and RF waveforms can be supported either natively or with the addition of a modest size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) peripheral. The project will result in the following benefits: - Acoustic beamforming as a new enabling technology: The proposed work builds on our team’s expertise to address the unique challenges of acoustic waveform beamforming with commodity devices. Novel DoD, IC, and private sector applications become feasible with this new capability. Enabled application concepts may include covert communication, data exfiltration, heterogeneous MIMO communication using multiple speakers and microphones, and remote manipulation of a receiver’s acoustic-sensitive hardware. - A complete development toolkit: CCET will provide a rich library of software modules allowing integration of coherent effects into applications without requiring deep understanding of the underlying math and physics. CCET will be integrated into a standard development environment, providing a broad development community the capability to test new coherent applications in operationally relevant environments. - Sustainable solution: The underlying techniques enable development of other coherent applications. Upgrades to the CCET toolkit can happen at commercial timescales, track the needs of future missions, and extend to broader frequencies via inconspicuous peripherals. The technology will enable precise target ranging, device synchronization, nullforming to suppress the reception of a signal at a designated receiver, indoor navigation, other relative coordinate system applications, and multistatic sonar. Non-military applications include ultrasonic beamforming for the medical device and industrial process engineering domains.
