Student-built radar device to be demonstrated at Wright Brothers Day

A student-built radar “see-in-the-dark” experiment will be demonstrated at the virtual Wright Brothers Day on Monday, Oct. 5.

The Radar Imaging and Object Recognition Demo will be conducted by students in the Sensors and Signals Exploitation Lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Students, faculty, staff and alumni are encouraged to visit the Wright Brothers Day website throughout Oct. 5 to learn about innovative research and ideas from Wright State faculty and local organizations and companies.

The demonstration will feature a lab radar system that detects and images a set of small reflectors that form an alphabet letter.

The radar processor forms the image suitable for a person to read, and the machine-learning algorithm automatically recognizes the letter. During in-person demos, a visitor sets up the reflectors to form a letter and then watches in real time as the radar forms the image and identifies the letter from the image.

Mike Saville, an associate professor of electrical engineering who directs the lab, said much of the work is motivated by national defense. Graduates have gone on to work for the U.S. Air Force and local defense contractors.

Attendees of the virtual Wright Brothers Day, organized by the American Marketing Association at Wright State, will learn about innovations via video demos.

Wright Brothers Day is an official commemorative day in the state of Ohio that was put in place in 2011. It commemorates the anniversary of Wilbur Wright’s 39-minute flight around Huffman Prairie on Oct. 5, 1905. The flight demonstrated that the Wright brothers had advanced their design to the point of a practical airplane.

Wright Brothers Day celebrates the history of Wilbur and Orville Wright while also recognizing innovative research taking place at the university today.