Automotive Engineering - March 2022 - 25

ADAS SENSORS FEATURE
Smarter software will
permit autonomousvehicle
developers to
extend radar's inclementweather
capabilities.
" Now that you're starting to look at higher resolution on cameras and radar,
I think there's going to be a little pressure on lidar. "
" At the same time you're doing that, you're going from two megapixels'
worth of data to four- to six-times that. Something's got to
process all that, " Amsrud cautioned. " I think there may come a point
at which you start looking at cost and performance and say, 'Well,
what if I put a little more of that compute out at the edge? What if I
let the cameras do some processing before they send the raw data to
the central computer?' That's going to be the next step that will keep
cameras from becoming just a base commodity. "
Radar gets smarter
Until recently, a common notion in autonomy has been that across all
conditions, a combination of sensors will be required to provide adequate
situational overviews, leading to assumptions that without
lidar, cameras or radar alone will not suffice. But even as lidar goes
solid state and prices continue to drop, smarter radar technology,
much of it software driven, is coming to market.
" We've spent most of our time talking about radar like short range,
medium range, long range that had to do more with a broad- or a narrow-field
of view, " Amsrud explaned. " But we didn't really talk a lot about
resolution. Imaging radar is now the thing that's putting resolution on the
table for radar. By today's standards, all the secret sauces are in software. "
Los Angeles-based Spartan Radar is one such company that is using
software to elevate and expand radar's role. " A 'better chip' is the story
we hear a lot, " suggested Nathan Mintz, Spartan Radar co-founder and
CEO, of the traditionally hardware-focused industry. " They're trying to
fit more IP cores into the same chip and not really looking at radar
from the standpoint of capability. The modes and algorithms are really
the power of what makes a radar tick. It's like a cell phone without
apps. We're adding the killer apps. "
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
" That's a lesson we learned in aerospace about 30
years ago, " Mintz explained, " when we transitioned
from mechanically scanned arrays that scanned the
sky very slowly and have a limited field of view, to
electronically scanned arrays, where suddenly you
could put energy anywhere in the sky instantaneously.
It became possible to do more than one thing, sometimes
two or three or five things at a time, " Mintz said
of the quantum leap of simultaneity.
" Radar really became this multifunction sensor that's
able to search, track, identify and find unique kinematics
of many objects of interest in the sky at once, " Mintz
noted. " In automotive, to a large extent, the radars are
still mostly single-function. That's why you see such a
proliferation of sensors coming out on the bumper of
newer vehicles where you have very short-range, medium-range
and long-range radars all cohabitating on the
same car with different applications in mind. "
According to Mintz, lidar is not yet an ideal solution,
citing cost, complexity, robustness and reliability issues
that radar doesn't have. " And if you can make radar that
can reliably produce imagery below one degree in resolution,
then it's competitive and the lidar might not be
necessary, " he said. " I think where lidar had the advantage
is that the imagery that it produces looks much
more similar to what you see from cameras. "
Though the industry already is well-acquainted with
integrating radar hardware, getting AI engineers to familiarize
themselves with radar imagery will steepen the
learning curve. " They know how to put this in a bumper,
March 2022 25
SPARTAN RADAR
Automotive Engineering - March 2022

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