CS-MIMOAR-EC · Cognitive Sparse MIMO Automotive Radar with Embedded Communications: Enabling Safer Driving in Greener Environment

Automotive radar provides a 360-degree surround sensing capability under all weather conditions and makes driving safer, with or without a hand on the steering wheel, thus presenting itself as viable and affordable solution to EU's ambitious ""Vision Zero"" goal in road safety. Future automotive radar devices need to adhere to cost and size restrictions while still addressing the required performance requirements, such as high resolution 5-Dimensional point cloud sensing, increased susceptibility to mutual interferences and embedded V2X communication in automotive sensing in a low-power, low-cost and compact design. In response to that, this fellowship aims to investigate cognitive sparse MIMO automotive radar sensing with embedded communication, which can counteract the dilemmas between performance and overhead, in turn enabling a safer driving in a greener environment. So far, no existing automotive radar has attempted to add cognizance of MIMO array configuration and transmit waveforms for performance improvement. The proposed work goes against the common regime of conventional automotive radar, where both a fixed MIMO array and transmit waveforms are assumed regardless of a dynamic road scene, and embarks upon a novel sparse automotive sensing paradigm with cognition, where array reconfigurability and waveform optimization are incorporated into the ""perception-action"" cycle by antenna selection via radio frequency switches. Successful achievements of this fellowship will lead to a timely and useful contribution to automotive radar and relevant communities, including: (1) novel techniques of joint automotive sensing and full duplex communication, (2) systematical simulations and experimental data, (3) an initial prototype implemented on a digital, software defined radar platform. In the long term, the successful achievement of this project will reduce deaths and injuries on European roads once upon commercialization.""