Situation-aware Space-time Waveform Design for Automotive MIMO Radars

Radar is a key technology in automotive driving for target detection and perception. In this work, we leverage prior environmental information in the form of occupancy maps to design space-time codes for a fully digital MIMO radar. We transform this design problem into the optimization of spatial beamforming gains and time-domain codes. The beamforming gains are optimized to enhance the strength of returns from cells associated with a higher uncertainty of occupancy. The time-domain codes are optimized to minimize the correlation between returns of targets within the drivable space. We validate our method on the nuScenes dataset to show that the designed space-time codes achieve higher detection rates than designs that do not rely on prior information from occupancy maps.