Research Fellowship Opportunity: Hardware-in-the-Loop

AFRL is interested in advancing the state-of-the-art of phenomenology modeling and scene emulation for evaluating imaging sensor response to a variety of target, flow field, background, and atmospheric effects. Research is elicited to improve current simulation capabilities in terms of radiometric, spatial, and temporal fidelity for the broad range of potential scenarios Air Force systems might operate within. Application of advanced parallel architectures to physical models in order to achieve real-time sensor data rates, techniques for high-fidelity modeling of complicated electro-optical and RF environments, and modeling of complex environments with large numbers of networked sensors are a few examples of areas of interest. 

Research is also needed to advance hardware-in-the-loop target scene generators, e.g., photonic sources for high-resolution emulation of in-band scenes and reconfigurable techniques for real-time emulation of radio frequency signal returns. Interest areas include infrared light emitting diode (IRLED) arrays, high-resolution spatial light modulation, MEMS structures for emissive sources, panoramic distributed sources for immersive simulation of biomimetic UAVs, and software defined radio techniques for RF target simulators. The general objective of this research topic is to advance technology applicable to sensor testing in digital and hardware-in-the-loop simulation environments.