The ASPIRE 3rd Annual Workshop co-chaired by Dr Mohammed Jahangir and Dr Carmine Clemente was held virtually on Cisco Webex on the 9th of July, 2021.

 

The workshop was split into two sessions with the morning session dedicated to the topic on Drone Surveillance and the afternoon session covering a broader theme of Radar Signal Processing.

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Overall, the event had 9 presenters, and over 60 attendees from a wide range of backgrounds across the remote sensing technology domain.

 

The group contained people from the spectrum of academia, PhD students and research fellows, to those in industry and government, including Leonardo, BAE, Aveillant, the Home Office and DSTL.

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The pillar concept linking the attendees was Advanced Signal Processing, and the presentations explored in good depth the various key aspects within this that are most important for the surveillance of drones: detection, tracking, classification during the morning session.

 

Indeed, broader topics of advanced SAR and radar multistatics that are future trends of surveillance were covered in the presentations during the afternoon session.

 

Overall knowledge was shared on many aspects of counter-UAV technology in both the cutting-edge research of today where the technology readiness level is near deployment, and advanced hardware and processing options that are less mature. 

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Each presenter received one-to-two questions on average immediately after, or in the chat. The morning session ran behind schedule slightly, with the hour lunch cut to 45 minutes, which encouraged questions in the chat allowing for well thought out answers form the presenters, alongside the few live questions answered. Overall, the lack of time in the morning session did not seem to massively affect the volume of questions and interactions through the chat, and the final session ended just ahead of schedule.

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The discussion concluding the presentations began on schedule. Applications of some presentation focuses were applied to wide radar applications, and a brief but healthy discussion was had.

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Finally, feedback of the workshop was brief and positive, with little criticism of the online format; just some longing for in person meetings to begin again soon.

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Post event a number of positive accolades were received and to quote just one

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It was a really good workshop with quite some new material to think about and digest in the following days

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