Linearization of Radar Target Simulators

The topics electric mobility and autonomous driving are at the moment in the main focus of the automotive industry. While electric mobility demands solutions for energy storage and supply, autonomous driving needs sensors with a high resolution and intensive signal processing to have a accurate perception and interpretation of the car's surroundings. To ensure the functionality of the sensors in combination with the signal post processing, long test drives need to be performed. Reducing the amount of test drives outside on public streets will result in faster development cycles and lower costs. To compensate the lower amount of kilometers driven, test are performed in a labratory with controllable conditions. As a result, an enviroment that can simulate a dynamic and realistic world to the autonoumous car's sensors is needed. To fulfill this requirement a hardware-in-the-loop approach is chosen, where the sensors themselves are stimulated by simulators like they would be in the outside world. In the area of radar sensors, as they are used in cars to detect obstacles, this means a target simulator is chosen that can receive the transmit signal of the radar, manipulate it and send it back towards the radar to give the impression of a real target.

The aim of this work is the linearization of a radar target simulator. Due to hardware non-idealities of the target simulator, replayed scenarios are generated with distortions. The non-linear behavior of the employed hardware components cause a great amount of problems. Non-linearities can be reduced either on the hardware- or software level. Different concepts for the linearization are to be elaborated, simulated and verified. The focus of the thesis can be chosen freely.