Study on the Location of mmWave Antenna for the Autonomous Car’s Detection and Ranging Sensors

The effect of vehicle’s proximity on the radiation pattern when the RADAR’s antenna is mounted on the body of autonomous cars is analysed. Two directional radiation patterns with different specifications are placed at different locations of a realistic car body model. The simulation is performed based on ray-tracing method at 77 GHz, the standard frequency for self-driving applications. It is shown that to obtain a robust RADAR sensor, the antenna radiation pattern is better to have relatively higher gain and lower side-lobe-level (SLL), than narrower half power-beamwidth (HPBW) and higher front-to-back (F/B) ratio. Both academia and industry can benefit from this study.