Radar for Automotive, UAV, and Industrial Applications
At the institute of microwave engineering, radar systems are designed for applications in the automotive or industrial sector and for drones/UAVs (unmaned areal vehicles), including the development of the corresponding radar signal processing.
The research focuses on the design of the whole radar system. This not only covers the frontend and the backend, but also the system concept and the hardware-related signal processing. For this purpose, special antennas, passive RF components, as well as circuits for frequency synthesis, signal amplification and filtering are designed and manufactured.
The systems are designed to meet the requirements of the specific application. For example, in the frequency range between 1 GHz and 4 GHz, drone-based sensor systems are developed. In this application, the institute is researching on an all-digital radar used to create elevation models, as well as a FMCW-radar detecting buried objects such as anti-personnel mines.
Research is also being conducted on both FMCW and digital radars in the frequency range between 76 GHz and 81 GHz used in the automotive sector. Especially high-resolution MIMO radars and radar networks are investigated. These systems are used for robust gesture recognition as well as SAR- and grid map-based detection of the environment. Moreover, new coherent network concepts are implemented to allow a high-resolution angle estimation, which improve the target separability in traffic scenarios. Finally, with an increasing number of radar sensors in road traffic, the probability of interference increases. Therefore, strategies for active interference avoidance are being researched.
In the industrial sector, the institute is working on an architecture for a high-resolution 2D-MIMO radar at 300 GHz. Another focus is the mass production of antenna arrays. In particular, novel calibration methods are developed. These methods allow the reduction of the size of the anechoic chamber and the time needed for calibration measurements, while providing more information about the systems.
Skills / Expertise
- Application-specific system design for radar sensors
- Hardware-design and -manufacturing, including front- and backend
- Innovative algorithms for radar signal processing
- Utilizing radar sensors for new applications
- System design and signal processing for digital radars
- OFDM- and PMCW modulation
- Signal generation and processing with FPGAs
- Design of radar networks providing enhanced performance
- Multi-perspective radar systems
- Novel coherent network architectures
Funded Projects In addition to a variety of bilateral industrial projects the following research projects are handled:
- Urs-Endress-Stiftung: Project „Findmine“, Drone-based mine detection via GPR/SAR
- DFG: Sub-THz scalable sensor-SoC
- DFG: PN radar networks with phase-noise suppression
- DFG: Multistatic coherent MIMO radar-networks
- BMBF: „IMIKO RADAR“, Interference minimization by cooperative radars
- MWK: „Intuitiver“, Radar-based intention identification of pedestrians