Future Trends in Automotive Radar / Imaging Radar

Abstract

There is a growing interest ofcar manufacturers in sensors monitoring the car's surrounding area in order to improve safety systems from mere crash survival to crash prediction or prevention by early detection of hazardous -situations. Therefore radar sensors have been intensively investigated for many years. A large variety of radar based vehicular sensors have been developed. Narrow-beam radars are tested for intelligent cruise control (ICC), collision or obstacle warning, other sensors are used for stop&go operation, as lane change aid, for side or rear impact warning. Though first radar sensors for ICC operation are moving into the pre-production phase, further improvement in low-cost high-volume manufacturing is essentiaL Next generations of automotive radar sensors will take advantage of increased signal processing power, progress in semiconductor technology, and improved packaging and assembly techniques. Future radar sensors will comprise electronically scanned beams allowingfor better resolution with a high image update rate. Fusion ofradar with other on board sensors (e.g. video) willfurther improve the performance ofcar safety systems, leading to intelligent vehicles infuture.

Radar Target Simulation for Vehicle-in-the-Loop Testing

“…As RTS systems have already been successfully integrated into vehicle test beds, they lack the capability of simulating a sufficient amount of targets to realistically represent complex traffic scenarios [18] or are limited to conventional FMCW or chirp sequence modulated radars [33]. Future automotive radar sensors, however, will have the ability to create high resolution, three-dimensional radar images [40,41]. These sensors will necessitate the simulation of virtual scenarios that comprise a high number of artificial radar echoes.…”

Height-Finding for Automotive THz Radars

“…The coordinate y of the intersection points of the curves can be obtained by solving the equation (8), which is obtained from using both equation (7) and the first equation from (5):…”

“…Like many sonar systems and some lower-frequency radar systems, the proposed THz imaging produces information, in this case height, by comparing measurements across an array of sensors [7], [8]. A fully-filled array of sensors would have to be very dense, since the distance between sensors must be proportional to wavelength if ambiguities (grating lobes) are to be avoided.…”

Considerations on radar localization in multi-target environments

“…In recent years, a number of applications for close-range imaging via millimeter wave radar sensors like automotive radar systems (Wenger, 1998) or through-wall imaging (Yang and Fathy, 2007) emerged for locating multiple targets in the environment. Current implementations often use either mechanical shifts of the antenna position to synthesize a virtually enlarged aperture thus exhibiting an increased lateral resolution or use electronically adjustable narrow beam antenna arrays in order to detect the position of passive radar targets in two or three spatial dimensions.…”