Super Resolution Wide Aperture Automotive Radar

State-of-the-art automotive radars have an angular resolution of 1°, which is insufficient for estimating the objects shape and boundaries at long distance. In this paper, we design a novel automotive radar with 1m aperture, which is an order of magnitude larger aperture than state-of-the-art automotive radars, and thus achieves super high angular resolution of 0.1°. The radar is designed to overcomes the major technical challenges of a wide aperture radar, which are: non-robust phase coherency over a wide aperture, spanning a wide aperture with sparse antenna elements, simultaneous non-interfering transmissions from a relatively large number of transmit antennas with unambiguous target speed estimation, and high complexity of near-field beamforming. We demonstrate the super high resolution performance of the radar in automotive scenarios, and show that it attains comparable results to a high resolution LIDAR at short range, and outperforms the LIDAR at long ranges. The wide aperture radar has the potential to enable autonomous driving at higher speed, and also to increase the operation of autonomous driving to more regions and climates.