The Design of a High Performance MMW Radar System for Autonomous Land Vehicle Navigation

This paper describes the design of a high performance 77GHz millimetre wave radar, signal processing and control system for use in autonomous vehicle navigation. The radar front end and intermediate frequency components are described together with a method of distinguishing pre-placed target beacons from other reflectors using the polarisation of the reflected signal. Digital signal processing hardware is described which allows reflected signal power to be determined at incremental distances from the radar. A control unit maintains a constant rotational velocity of a deflector plate positioned above the aperture and reads the azimuth of each radar sweep. In this way, range and bearing measurements are available to update a Kalman filter estimating vehicle location as it navigates around an environment.