Research Insights

The University of Georgia research program, titled, “Advanced Geospatial Analytics and Electromagnetic Shielding Technologies for Enhanced Sustainability,” addresses new technological capabilities and novel mechanisms that reside at the nexus of sustainability and autonomy in order to enable multi-domain operations (MDO) in a broad range of challenging environments and applications. Leveraging technology advancements in geospatial intelligence and advanced shielding materials will provide multi-layered protection to ensure operational success with high levels of sustainability. The proposed fundamental research will help advance multi-agent autonomous sensing, sensor fusion, and sensor robustness for MDO. An emphasis will be placed on developing solutions for edge devices that can operate in harsh and GPS-denied environments. The research is centered on the development of a robust terrain awareness system (3D) that fuses diverse spatial data streams and leverages advances in deep neural networks (DNNs), simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and heterogeneous computing. Further enhancement of terrain awareness systems will be investigated with a semantic segmentation algorithm combining SLAM and deep semantic segmentation networks to improve image registration performance. Semantic information can narrow the location search range, thereby improving system stability across various scenes. Uncertainty in terrain awareness will be addressed by quantifying uncertainty in digital terrain models, building terrain awareness algorithms that consider uncertainty in terrain data, and optimizing the algorithms on edge devices. The work also seeks to achieve real-time, high-precision 3D mapping by fusing heterogeneous sensing sources collected by UAVs, UGVs, and satellites, and by achieving real-time map construction on resource-constrained edge devices. In order to further assure that edge devices can operate in harsh environments, this work will also deliver research in novel approaches to address electromagnetic threat and protection. The research is based on innovative multidimensional composites containing low-dimensional filler particles, i.e., assemblies of 1D and 2D nanomaterials, within polymer matrices. The work plan begins with a focus on the low-dimensional nanomaterials: initial selection of ~201D and 2D compositions based on their properties in bulk and nanostructured forms; their preparation and modification on laboratory scale by top-down synthetic methods; their characterization to determine composition, phase, and dimensions; and evaluation of their shielding effectiveness (SE) over a broad frequency range of approximately 300 kHz to 12 GHz (GFD). The anticipated outcome is a set of 5-8 low-dimensional nanomaterials with promising EMI shielding properties, each with gram-scale synthetic protocols, confirmation through materials characterization techniques, and suitable stability.

Funder: U.S. Department of Army 

Amount: $4,741,644 

PI: Deepak Mishra, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography