PhD Studentship: High-frequency Radar Imaging and Recognition of The Marine Environment from Unmanned Robotic Platforms

All sea vessels, from large, manned ships transporting up to 80% of the world’s goods to small autonomous boats e.g. for search and rescue applications, require highly capable and intelligent radar sensors to understand their local surroundings at sea and inform optimal action. To ensure safety requires the ability to reliably detect, image and recognise their environment, in terms of surrounding sea conditions (e.g. swells), debris (flotsam and jetsam) as well as humans and sea animals.

Future higher-frequency radar sensors can bring unprecedented opportunities in creating a complete, accurate picture of the marine environment, irrespective of weather or lighting conditions. Combined with the latest in robotic technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI), these opportunities could become a step change in marine situational awareness but their capabilities and their performance limits are yet to be explored. Such capabilities include:

• Smaller form factors: Thus enabling the deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or “drones”) to scout ahead of a vessel, thus increasing its detection range and allowing more time to effectively react
• Ultra-fine image spatial resolution: Allowing smaller objects to be imaged and combined with the agility of robotic platforms such as UAVs, extending 2-D imagery to three dimensions
• AI techniques: To enable significant improvements in recognising small objects from high-resolution radar images

The purpose of the project is to identify and develop radar imaging system concepts to allow high resolution imagery of small marine objects from commercial Unmanned Aerial or Surface Vehicles (UAVs/USVs), and to harness this imagery to characterise the surroundings of a sea vessel. Such systems will comprise both hardware and signal processing approaches to acquire data and obtain high resolution images of small targets.

The PhD project will include a number of fundamental and experimental studies related to the ability to generate focused radar imagery in sea conditions, by developing environment-specific algorithms and machine learning approaches. At the end of the project a technology demonstrator will be built using UAV- and USV- mounted radar sensors, and it will be tested in real world conditions at various seaside locations.

The prospective candidate will join the acclaimed Microwave Integrated Systems Laboratory (www.birmingham.ac.uk/misl), one of the largest radar research groups in Europe, and will work alongside a community of PhD researchers, research staff and academics in a vibrant and creative atmosphere. This is an EPSRC ICASE award with Thales UK as the industrial sponsor. The ICASE provides competitive PhD scholarship with additional top-up on the conventional PhD stipend from the industrial partner and has a budget for professional development, including attending advanced training courses, conferences and other expenses relevant to the subject of PhD.

Funding notes:

Only Home (UK citizens) students are eligible for this kind of scholarship. Successful candidate will have an excellent background in Engineering, Physics or a related subject area (first class degree or equivalent). We invite applications from highly motivated individuals, able to master complex subjects and eager to undertake research in a system- level approach with both theoretical and experimental thrusts of activities, publish research papers and advance research as part of a team of researchers working in the area. For more details, please see: https://www.ukri.org/what-we-do/developing-people-and-skills/epsrc/studentships/industrial-case/.

Supervisor(s): Prof. Mike Antoniou and Prof. Marina Gashinova

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