Marek Hilton

Research

Radar

I currently work on projects in the area of signal processing for over the horizon radar (OTHR), and land-based radar for space domain awareness. As space becomes more crowded and, with rising global tensions, more contested, being able to monitor man-made objects in space is becoming evermore important.

Typically, observation of man-made satellites is typically done using relatively inexpensive optical telescopes but radar provides some unique capabilities that optical telescopes do not. Whereas optical telescopes provide fine angular resolution, radars provide fine range resolution and can measure range-rate.

Time Encoding

Time encoding is alternative approach to sampling where information is stored in the timings and not the ‘magnitude’ of a sample. It is partly inspired by how biological neurons exhibit behaviour that consists of bursts of electrical activity that are not (necessarily) synchronised.¹ This is unlike typical samplers and digital circuits which operate to a clock.

My PhD thesis was on the topic of time encoding and the subject is of continuing interest to me. In particular, much of current research in time encoding overlaps significantly with sampling theory for non-uniform samples. I am interested in developing sampling theory that better captures the unique aspects of time encoded samples and isn’t just a mapping of time encoding to typical non-uniform samples.

Planning for Autonomous Platforms, Tracking, and Search

This a new topic for me as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham working with Beth Jelfs and Chris Gilliam. We’re interested in planning algorithms that can coordinate multiple autonomous platforms in the task of searching and tracking objects. The problem is very interesting for several reasons. For one, it requires optimising over multiple competing objectives. For example, acquiring a better track on one object usually requires a platform to look at a region it has already looked at before whereas to improve search efficiency the platform should want to look at regions it has not yet seen. Coordination of multiple platforms in such a task is also non-trivial. Communication links and bandwidth dictate how much information can be shared at any point in time. Most importantly of all, comprehensively searching the entire space of plans for a large number of cooperating platforms is largely intractable.