ECE PhD students Morriel Kasher and Rahul Aggarwal (under the supervision of Dr. Predrag Spasojevic) were selected as a finalist team for the 2023 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) for their proposal entitled Efficient Fixed-Point Design of Wideband MIMO Radar for Autonomous Driving.
The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship is a highly nation-wide competitive award offered to teams of two PhD students. Applicants submit proposals for innovative research ideas in the fields of communications, electronics, computing, and machine learning. This year 182 proposals were submitted representing two dozen universities across North America, from which only a small handful of finalists were selected. Morriel and Rahul are only the 8th team from Rutgers to reach the finalist stage in the past 15 years.
Their proposal combines a cutting-edge multi-antenna radar architecture with state-of-the-art signal design and a novel adaptive processing algorithm to produce fast, accurate, and interference-robust radar measurements in real-time. This is all made feasible to implement using further innovations in low-resolution communication and signal processing. One immediate application is in autonomous driving, where range and angle measurements must be taken from a radar with extremely low latency and high accuracy to appropriately position the vehicle even in high-traffic areas.
Congratulations to Predrag, Morriel and Rahul.