Synthetic Aperture Radar Towards Automotive Applications

Today, in almost all vehicle classes automotive radars are used to increase driver safety by assistance systems like active cruise control (ACC) or blind spot detectors. Due to the continuous improvement of the measurement accuracies new fields of applications arise for radar like free space detection or localization. For example, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) makes it possible to improve the azimuth resolution by exploiting the driveway. The quality of the image, however, depends significantly on the accuracy of the motion estimation of the antenna. Current researches in this area use the vehicle odometry to estimate the antenna position. The following paper investigates an approach to carry out synthesis of an artificial aperture by means of radar-based motion estimation.