ASGARDI: A Novel Frequency-based Automotive Radar Target Simulator

Creating realistic, rich and dynamic environment for testing automotive radars is highly demanded for different applications from early-stage radar development to functions development, verification and validation for driver assistance or autonomous driving. This requires a radar target simulator (RTS) capable of generating many point targets with arbitrary trajectories. This paper introduces a fundamentally different RTS approach compared with the existing delay-line based methods. In this approach, the perception of a moving target is created in the spectrum domain. The result is a flexible and affordable RTS. It has some advantages desirable for automotive industry such as the possibility to simulate close-to-zero minimum distances and multiple targets. Since there is no processing delay, this method is suitable for safety-critical tests in over-the-air hardware-in-the-loop setups.