Performance Evaluation Of Wide Aperture Radar For Automotive Applications

The angular resolution of the state-of-the-art automotive radars is about 1°, due to the relatively short aperture of about 10cm. In this paper we present novel results of a 1m aperture automotive prototype radar that achieves 0.1° resolution. Since the 1m aperture is about the maximal horizontal aperture of a vehicle, then 0.1° angular resolution is the maximal practical resolution with 78GHz technology. Hence the demonstrated performance can be considered as the upper performance limit of the 78GHz frequency. We analyze the wide aperture radar performance advantage with respect to state-of-the-art short aperture radar and high resolution LIDAR sensor, in various challenging automotive scenarios. The wide aperture radar attains a relatively large number of detection points from the object surface, which are much more accurate than the conventional short aperture radar, and therefore enables to accurately estimate the object position, size and boundaries, which is essential for autonomous driving. It attains comparable performance to LIDAR at short to medium range, and outperforms LIDAR at long range. The pioneer performance evaluation presented in this paper shows the high potential performance of wide aperture automotive radars and motivates their application in next generation autonomous driving systems.