Automotive RaDaRs that incorporate ADAS-AD perform a wide spectrum of monitoring tasks for event-free autonomous navigation. Most such systems are pulsed RaDaRs, because this principle provides high dynamic gain, short measurement times and unproblematic signal processing. On a subjective level, such ADAS application demands an antenna radiation pattern tailor-made for its efficient functionality. Having electronic beam steering capabilities with good resolution and imaging properties, in addition to satisfying the radiation pattern morphologies and peak side lobe levels, would give more functionality to existing ADAS applications.
Potholes on interstate highways and local roads have been a bane of road transportation worldwide. The presence of potholes has a devastating impact on the vehicular platforms – with the attended fiscal element – in addition to hampering a smooth and predictable flow of traffic that is paramount to future autonomous road transportation. The impact on air quality and driveability, on account of the sluggish traffic flow over a stretch of such degraded tarmac generating harmful vehicular exhaust from the laboured performance by its engines, is substantial.
A medium range RaDaR (MRR) would serve as a capable ADAS tool in this context. An MRR sets a requirement for availability of multiple instances of narrower beams that shall enable tandem detection of as many potholes over a particular stretch of degraded tarmac. An added functionality in this operation is the processing of RaDaR 2-D data in real time. The high spatial resolution radio image data would offer a measure of the pothole parameters, against which the autonomous driving aspect could be altered by a suitable proportion in the interest of defining the traffic predictability criterion. Such operations are highly computation-intense, with the need for agile engines to be implemented in hardware and software. The inherent parallelism and reconfigurability features offered by FPGAs would ably assist by providing an opportunity to specialize the data processing implementation as needed. This opportunity is likely to grow as the logic capacity of FPGAs increases and the cost of FPGA devices is reduced. In the aforementioned context, FPGA-based beamforming and radar processing systems would be developed, tested. and deployed. The RaDaR would be designed as capable of deploying upto 10 highly-directive beams that could enable sensing over a range of 50 m, with a range resolution of few tens of cm and a spatial resolution of few cm, without the aid of external delay elements. The use of FPGAs in vehicular radar systems and an analysis of their robustness would be comprehensively evaluated during the project.
An added element in the work shall be the geo-tagging aspect, that would help generate a vast database of all such pothole detections across a span of geography criss-crossed by all types of roads. A low-latency communication infrastructure would be paramount to this operation, given the pervasive access requirements placed on the data by multitudes of vehicular systems before they encounter any pothole from the catalogue. The database requirements could be met if they are cloud-based systems, that feature elements of data and system security.

Project Proposal

1. High-level project introduction and performance expectation

2. Block Diagram

3. Expected sustainability results, projected resource savings