Experimental Evaluation of a MIMO Radar Performance for ADAS Application

Among the sensors necessary to equip vehicles with an autonomous driving system, there is a tacit agreement that cameras and some type of radar would be essential. The ability of radar to spatially locate objects (pedestrians, other vehicles, trees, street furniture, and traffic signs) makes it the most economical complement to the cameras in the visible spectrum in order to give the correct depth to scenes. From the echoes obtained by the radar, some data fusion algorithms will try to locate each object in its correct place within the space surrounding the vehicle. In any case, the usefulness of the radar will be determined by several performance parameters, such as its average error in distance, the maximum errors, and the number of echoes per second it can provide. In this work, we have tested experimentally the AWR1843 MIMO radar from Texas Instruments to measure those parameters.