Over-The-Air Automotive Radar System Testing

Testing automotive radar systems becomes more and more significant due to the safety critical decisions taken by radar systems in vehicles. With increasing vehicular autonomy in levels 3 to 5, the necessary system tests increase significantly before incorporating the radar system into the advanced driver assistance system. High effort is being made to move the system tests from the road to the labs, as being already the case for hardware-and vehicle-in-the-loop test systems. The paper at hand addresses investigations of different shapes of radar test system front-end antenna configurations. It is shown that in a bi-static front-end setup, the transmitting and receiving antenna shall be placed as closely together as possible in order to avoid angular discrepancies between physical target angle and evaluated target angle by multiple-input multiple-output radar systems under test.