$1.5 million awarded in research partnership with ERDC
December 20, 2021
Two Mississippi State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professors were recently awarded over $1.5 million as part of a cooperative agreement from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).
Principal investigator Ali Cafer Gurbuz and Mehmet Kurum received the funding for their project Detecting Biological and Chemical Threats in Complex Subterranean Environments to help military and civilian first responders overcome the significant challenges in subterranean environments.
“The hazards vary drastically across domains that can degrade or change over time and are often too high-risk for personnel to enter,” Gurbuz said. “Chemical and biological threats could vary in their size, quantity, and detection signatures and can be more robustly detected, identified, and localized using multi-sensor approaches by benefiting complementary nature of their polarization spectral signatures, motion, and sound.”
The project will utilize various sensor modalities and combinations, including polarimetric imaging systems at five polarization bands for object detection, acoustic arrays for sound localization, and radio frequency (RF) micro-Doppler for motion discrimination. They will then be integrated into unmanned ground vehicles to develop enhanced signal processing and data analytics in order to identify hazards.
For more information about Dr. Gurbuz, visit here [Ali Gurbuz (msstate.edu)]
For more information about Dr. Kurum, visit here [Mehmet Kurum (msstate.edu)]
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University consists of 27 faculty members (including 6 endowed professors), 7 professional staff, and over 700 undergraduate and graduate students with approximately 100 being at the Ph.D. level. With research expenditure of the department in excess of $13M, the department houses the largest High Voltage Laboratory among North American universities. For more detailed information on the department, please visit our website www.ece.msstate.edu.