Chapter 20 – Automotive Radar∗

Radar is becoming an important automotive technology. Automotive radar systems are the primary sensor used in adaptive cruise control and are a critical sensor system in autonomous driving assistance systems (ADAS). In ADAS, automotive radar is one of the several sensor systems for collision avoidance, pedestrian and cyclist detection, and complements vision-based camera-sensing systems. The radar technology generally used is frequency-modulated continuous-wave or FMCW radar, which is quite different from the pulse-Doppler radar. The analog and RF hardware in millimeter FMCW is much less costly than that of pulse-Doppler radar. In addition, the digital processing requirements are generally modest and can be performed in low-cost field programmable gate arrays, microprocessors with specialized acceleration engines, or specialized application-specific integrated circuits.