Fundamentals of Automotive Radar Training by Tonex
Fundamentals Automotive Radar training covers Automotive Radar System basics. It covers specifications of emerging technologies and functions used in modern automotive radar systems.
Automotive radar is emerging as a key technology enabling intelligent and autonomous features in modern vehicles.
Automotive radar is focused on relieving drivers from monotonous tasks, reducing driver stress, and adding life-saving automatic interventions.
A few years ago, automotive radar technology began appearing in many high-end cars to enable essential safety and comfort features including adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency breaking systems where a vehicle can steeply decelerate without driver involvement to avoid a potential collision.
The deployment of these features has initially been limited to high-end vehicles because of the high cost of sensing technology.
But this is about the change. The expected vast global market penetration of automotive radar technology has required both international and local regulatory authorities to work in conjunction with the automotive industry to develop appropriate and harmonized standards.
It is now anticipated that by 2030 the penetration of automotive radars will reach around 65% in Europe and 50% in the United States.
Automotive radar systems are the primary sensor used in adaptive cruise control and are a critical sensor system in autonomous driving assistance systems (ADAS).
In ADAS, automotive radar is one of the several sensor systems for collision avoidance, pedestrian and cyclist detection, and complements vision-based camera-sensing systems.
The radar technology generally used is frequency-modulated continuous-wave or FMCW radar, which is quite different from the pulse-Doppler radar.
The analog and RF hardware in millimeter FMCW is much less costly than that of pulse-Doppler radar.
In addition, the digital processing requirements are generally modest and can be performed in low-cost field programmable gate arrays, microprocessors with specialized acceleration engines, or specialized application-specific integrated circuits.
Radar sensors measure the range, radial velocity and location of targets in the vicinity under any weather conditions. Thanks to good performance data and low costs, they lay the foundations for more and more assistance and safety functions in vehicles, nowadays even reaching the compact class.
Sensors for the automotive sector operate in the frequency bands around 24 GHz, 77 GHz and 79 GHz (see box on page 32 for details). In order to detect and resolve two adjacent objects, the range resolution of the sensor must be higher than the separation of the objects from each other. However, wide signal bandwidths are required for a high range resolution.
The current generation of radar-equipped vehicles typically has one front radar for adaptive cruise control with about a 150-m range. There is often a second front radar with a wider field of view (FOV) for emergency brake assist. In the rear, there are two radars with up to an 80-m range for detecting vehicles behind the car.
Industry analysts expect the range of all these radars to rise in the future, especially for rear radar which is forecast to reach 160 m. The overall effect will be that of a 360° cocoon around the car.
The typical vehicular radar module today contains five major functional building blocks: The antenna, the RF section, a high-speed digital interface, a signal processor and a power section.
Fundamentals of Automotive Radar Course by Tonex
Fundamentals of Automotive Radar training is a 2-day training course covering basics of radar used in automotive industry as a core ADAS technology. Participants will learn the principals of integrated, safe and secure automotive radar applications.
Gain a working knowledge of automotive radar. In this course, discover all you need to know to effectively use this automotive radar in your applications.
Who Should Attend
This course is designed for systems engineers, hardware and software design engineers, managers, and employees with little or no automotive radar experience. The course is also useful for those who have experience with automotive radar but have never had any formal training on the topics.
What You Will Learn
- An overview of the automotive radar key principals
- Basic understanding of automotive radar use cases and target applications
- Basics of ADAS and Autonomous Driving
- A summary of automotive radar tools and applications
- How to design an automotive radar on a platform
- Basics of signal processing used in automotive radar systems engineering
Course Agenda/Topics
Automotive Radar 101
- The basics of automotive Radar
- Radar applications
- Radar frequency band
- Radar Micro-Controller Units (MCUs)
- Microcontrollers for high-performance Radar
- Radar Transceiver
- Range calculation
- Doppler effects
- Automotive Radar RCS Measurements
- Radar detections
- High performance for imaging Radar
- Embedded Digital Signal Processor (DSP)
- Example of Signal Processing Toolkit (SPT)
- Performing Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) in real-time
- Intro to automotive functional safety ( ISO26262)
- Automotive functional safety ISO26262
- Security requirements for radar processing: ASIL ISO26262 ASIL B(D) requirements
- Case Study 1: Overview of fully integrated 77 GHz RFCMOS automotive radar transceiver
Basics of Automotive Radar Target Applications
- Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)
- Autonomous Emergency Brake (AEB)
- Blind Spot Detection (BSD)
- Cascaded Imaging Radar (IMR)
- Front/Rear Cross-traffic-Functions (FCTA/RCTA)
- Lane Change Assistance (LCA)
- Parking assist (PA)
- Radar 360° perception
- Reverse-Autonomous Emergency Braking (R-AEB)
Automotive mmWave Sensors Devices
- Introduction to mmWave SDKFM Modulator
- FM Transmitter
- Local Oscillator
- Mixer
- Side Band Filter
- IF Amplifier
- Balanced Detector
- Low Frequency Amplifier
- Switched Frequency Counter
- Average Frequency Counter
- FMCW radars
Introduction to FMCW Radars
- Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave Radar (FMCW Radar)
- FMCW Radar transceiver for short-medium- and long-range
- Basics of FMCW radar operation
- System design and engineering
- Principle of measurement
- Modulation patterns
- Sawtooth modulation
- Triangular modulation
- Square-wave modulation (simple frequency-shift keying, FSK)
- Stepped modulation (staircase voltage)
- Sinusoidal modulation
- staircase voltage
- Common modulation pattern for an FMCW radar
- Different measurement purposes
- Range estimation
- Range resolution
- Velocity estimation
- Angle estimation
- Antennas
- Automotive Radar antenna concepts (MIMO, antenna arrays)
- Doppler and micro doppler
Radar Signal Compression
- Introduction
- Compression overview
- Compression formats and ratios
Radar Signal Processing
- Components of signal processing
- FMCW- terms, Definitions, Parameters.
- Measurements : Range, Angle, Doppler, Height
- Range fft & Doppler fft, Angle fft, RD map
- Clutter removal and CFAR
- Final detection estimation; object classification at radar level
- Radar data processing
- Various steps involved in Radar data processing including coordinate transformations, ego vehicle speed compensation, filtering of dynamic and static detections
- clustering methods and object list generation
- Object tracking: Single Object Tracking (SOT), Multi-Object Tracking (MOT), Challenge of Data association in MOT, Predict – Measurement update cycle, brief introduction to tracking filters like Kalman filter and final track object list generation process
Other Automotive Radar Topics
- Phase Modulated Continuous Wave (PMCW) Radar
- PMCW waveform and MIMO technique
- Integration issues of RADAR
- Environmental impacts on Radar detection
- Effect of multipath propagation on RADAR detection
- Interference between automotive RADARs (inter-intra car)
- Unsupervised machine learning
- Clustering and feature extractions
- Object formation
- Single Object Tracking
- Multi Object Tracking
- Processor compute and memory requirements based on DSP
- Power supply requirements and selection
Fundamentals of Automotive Radar