Aloft Sensing is bringing high-performance radar sensing and advanced navigation to autonomous platforms in the stratosphere and other domains, leveraging innovative processing techniques and breakthrough electronics to transform the way Earth observation, tactical ISR, and assured PNT data is collected. Aloft’s modular software-defined radar architecture scales from small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS), to high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) aircraft, up to small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), enabling high-quality synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and sensitive change indication measurements from these non-traditional vehicles. Aloft's approach even extends to underwater synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) systems to enable undersea navigation while simultaneously mapping the sea floor. A key innovation behind Aloft's approach is a self-contained navigation technique that achieves micron-level localization and picosecond timing to maintain coherence over the sensor acquisition time, reducing the dependence on expensive and heavy external hardware. These same techniques uniquely enable coherent distributed sensing from multiple platforms for exponential performance gains and reconfigurable and resilient operations. Additional benefits include operation in GPS/IMU-challenged conditions, new approaches for accurate autonomous navigation, and enhanced sensing products, such as precise moving target geolocation, millimetric surface deformation, centimeter-level topography, and 3D volumetric reconstructions.
