Projects
The rapid proliferation of artificial satellites in near-Earth orbit has made tracking of orbital debris, objects whose trajectories cannot be actively controlled, an increasing priority for space safety.
ioLabs has been a core contributor to the BIRALES bistatic radar system, part of the European SST Support Framework and operated in collaboration with INAF and the Politecnico di Milano. BIRALES uses the Northern Cross radio telescope in Medicina, Italy as its multibeam receiver, with the transmitter located at the Italian Joint Test Range in Sardinia.
Building on the original 32-antenna configuration, ioLabs extended the digital backend to support 256 antennas, delivering GPU-accelerated beamforming, correlation, and channelisation at significantly higher data rates. The track detection pipeline (MSDS) was scaled accordingly, and the observation management interface was overhauled to support operational survey campaigns within the EU SST network.
Highlights
ioLabs led the digitisation of MEXART, the Mexican Array Radio Telescope, a 4,096-dipole transit interferometer operating at 140 MHz in Michoacán, Mexico, dedicated to interplanetary scintillation (IPS) observations for solar wind and space weather monitoring.
The original analog Butler Matrix beamformer produced just 16 fixed beams with poor directivity and required manual calibration. ioLabs replaced this with a hybrid FPGA- and GPU-accelerated digital backend capable of automatic calibration and the synthesis of up to 64 configurable sky beams, directly resolving the beam directionality limitations of the analog system.
The deployment also included a full monitoring and control system with a web-based telescope management interface, substantially improving both sensitivity and operational flexibility for space weather science.
Highlights
ioLabs contributed the new digital backend infrastructure for the Medicina Northern Cross telescope, Italy's largest transit radio telescope, upgraded through INAF under Italy's post-COVID PNRR national recovery programme.
The upgrade targets two flagship science cases: monitoring of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) objects and the detection of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Both require handling raw data rates on the order of 40 GB/s in real time across up to 256 beamformed antennas.
ioLabs led the development of the full software backend stack, covering data reception, beamforming, correlation, network traffic management, and the FRB search pipeline, enabling simultaneous processing across all beams to meet the telescope's scientific and operational requirements.
Highlights
Our Work
We've built prototypes across a range of sensing applications — from driver monitoring systems combining radar and camera, to multi-sensor pipelines integrating barcode scanners, weight sensors, and more.
If your project calls for bringing multiple data sources together, we have the experience to help.
Driver distraction is one of the leading causes of road accidents. We prototyped a real-time in-cabin monitoring system using computer vision to track gaze direction, eye state, and mouth position — providing continuous awareness of driver alertness without relying on cloud connectivity.
Managing traffic flow and road safety depends on accurate, real-time data. We prototyped a radar-based traffic monitoring system capable of tracking vehicles across multiple lanes, measuring inter-vehicle headway and providing the continuous situational awareness needed for modern traffic management.
Our Work
At ioLabs, we build signal processing and cloud architecture for mmWave radar systems. Our work goes beyond basic detection — we extract information about movement, behaviour, and physiological signals from radar data.
If you're exploring what mmWave radar can do for your product, we'd be happy to talk.
We can extract high-fidelity biological data from radar reflections. By focusing on small scale movements from phase changes in the radar reflections, our algorithms deliver accurate, real-time vital sign telemetry.
Radar can take you beyond simple motion detection. With MIMO radar, you can track how many people are in a space, where they are, and where they're heading.
Every movement produces a distinct pattern in the frequency and Doppler domain. By analysing how velocity and distance change over time, we can classify and interpret different types of motion — turning raw radar returns into structured, actionable data
A single sensor doesn't always tell the whole story.
By combining multiple sensor modalities we can fill in the gaps that any one sensor leaves behind, and build a more complete picture of what's happening in a scene.
Services
Once your sensors are generating data, you need a reliable way to get it where it needs to go. We design cloud-based monitoring systems built around secure, encrypted connectivity over TLS and mTLS, capable of aggregating data from multiple devices simultaneously.
For high-volume deployments, we build on high-throughput messaging systems to ensure data arrives reliably and at scale.
From single elements to large phased arrays, we design and simulate antenna systems for a wide range of frequencies. Our work spans array configuration, gain and directivity optimisation, bandwidth characterisation, and performance validation, grounded in hands-on experience with real-world deployments including large-scale radio telescope arrays.