Sectorized FMCW MIMO Radar by Modular Design With Non-Uniform Sparse Arrays

Automotive radars are designed to enhance road user safety and reduce the number of accidents on public roads and there is a constant demand to improve the performance for these radars. In this paper, a novel proof-of-concept multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar architecture is presented by frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW) transmission. For enhanced angular resolution, the radar uses a two-tier antenna setup leading to a sparse array arrangement, mainly in an effort to mitigate grating lobes and to offer different illuminations of the same scenario. Also, the experimentally verified sparse radar antenna designed for target detection at the receiver, achieves modest sidelobe levels and grating lobes well below 12 dB from the main beam maximum, whilst still maintaining competitive half-power beamwidths when compared to more conventionally spaced arrays. Moreover, the high impedance bandwidth of this receiver array and the supporting radar electronics (more than 6%) allows for the detection of targets at only a 10 cm spatial separation. The complete system is also capable of seeing a wide field-of-view (FOV) since it utilizes a network of radar modules to cover the forward −90
$^\circ$
to +90
$^\circ$
angular range by sectorization. In the best case, the measured radar system can resolve targets that are a distance of just
$\pm 2^\circ$
apart in angular separation.