Croatian Science Foundation Project HRZZ IP-2019-04-1064  

Smart platform for millimeter-wave environmental and industrial sensing  (MMSENSE)

Remote environmental and industrial sensing based on multi-spectral or radar imaging today plays an important role in ensuring sustainability and protection of natural resources, in saving time and energy in industry and agriculture, and in many other applications. Numerous examples of such systems exist which provide information like product quality to manufacturers, crops growth parameters to farmers or structural integrity details to civil engineers. With recent developments in electromagnetic millimetre-wave (mm-wave) technology, high-speed signal processing and artificial intelligence implementation, short range mm-wave remote sensing is experiencing strong growth with the market dictating new applications with increasingly higher levels of system autonomy.

The objective of this project is to investigate and realize methodologies, algorithms and hardware concepts that will meet the demands of these new applications in terms of improved autonomy, reasonable cost, energy efficiency and improved communication possibilities. The specific goals that will be achieved are; (i) efficient supervised machine learning classification of objects based on mm-wave radar scattering information, (ii) improved signal processing and compressing algorithms for mm-wave remote sensing radars, (iii) development of antenna array with smart control of beam scanning, and (iv) optimization of communication protocol for transmission of large quantities of data obtained by remote sensing. The final goal is to demonstrate developed principles on a smart mm-wave remote sensing platform that could be used in various environmental or industrial fields and easily integrated with other sensors in Internet-of-Things networks. Additionally, this research will significantly advance the level of expertise of our group and in particular of the young researchers involved through Master and PhD studies.