Echodyne Developing DAA Radar for SUAS
Photo: Robb Cohen Photography & Video.
Washington company Echodyne (Booth #1003) is releasing a radar available as a developer’s kit this week, the MESA-K-DEV. It is also developing a dedicated detect-and-avoid radar it believes will solve that large issue facing the commercial small unmanned aircraft community.
Using its patented Metamaterials Electronically Scanning Array, or MESA, radar technology, it is scaling down the MESA-K-DEV to be functional on smaller platforms, which needs an architecture that that the community thought was previously impossible, says CEO Eben Frankenberg.
With financial backing from Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the company is also winning favors from big names in the UAS world.
“Certainly people like the FAA and NASA are extremely interested in what we are doing,” says Frankenberg, who has showed the technology to former Federal Aviation Administrator Jim Williams.
“We told him what we were working on a while ago, and his comment was, if you guys can do this, this is a huge breakthrough.”
