Range and Doppler Cell Migration in Wideband Automotive Radar

The automobile industry has a strategic intent to develop vehicles capable of higher and higher levels of autonomy. Radar is a key sensing component, being the only viable option for all weather, 24-hour-a-day use. Autonomy will require the radar to provide much greater levels of detailed information than is available from today's cruise control and collision avoidance systems. In particular, much wider bandwidths are needed for high range resolution. Furthermore, high Doppler resolution, requiring long integration times, is needed for moving object classification. These two opposing requirements create significant design and signal processing challenges. This paper examines the way in which choices in the key design parameters effect performance, showing that as both range and Doppler resolutions are enhanced, the potential for received energy to migrate across resolution cells increases and must be corrected to enable measurement of both focused high-resolution imagery and micro-Doppler signatures, as well as restoring system sensitivity. An advanced range and Doppler cell migration correction algorithm is introduced and performance evaluated using both theory and experimentation.