CSIRO PhD Top-Up Scholarships provide enhanced opportunities in science and engineering for outstanding graduates enrolling in a PhD each year at Australian tertiary institutions as postgraduates. CSIRO PhD Top-Up Scholarships are now being offered in over 30 CSIRO research areas, for funding commencing in financial year 2021-22.
Project Title: Near-field adaptive beamforming in widely-spaced arbitrary arrays
Project Details: CSIRO is developing techniques to use its radio telescopes for tracking objects in space to contribute to Space Situational Awareness (SSA). This requires direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of received signals, and for our array telescopes, these objects are in the near field, where the wavefront curvature is significant. Conventional adaptive beamforming techniques assume the objects are in the far field. The research project aims to study and develop efficient self-calibration techniques to address the near-field array manifold correction in the presence of phase and amplitude errors and noise. The theoretical study is expected to be illustrated by data from one or more of our telescopes, such as the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) which consists of six 22-meter dishes. While our interest is in the use of our telescopes, this field of study has applications in many other areas including acoustics and radio communications.