Joint antenna-array calibration and direction of arrival estimation for automotive radars

We present an iterative method for joint antenna-array calibration and direction of arrival estimation using millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) radar operating at 77 GHz. The calibration compensates for antenna-array coupling, and phase and gain errors, and does not require any training data. This method is well suited for applications, such as automotive radars, where multiple antenna elements are packaged on a chip and where offline calibration is either expensive or is not possible. The proposed method is highly effective when the array coupling is a function of direction of arriving waves from the object. The novel optimization method proposed in the paper allows it to be used for a 2D array of any shape. Experiments using real data collected from a four-element array on a single-chip radar demonstrate the viability of the algorithm.

[1]  I. Gupta,et al.  Effect of mutual coupling on the performance of adaptive arrays , 1983 .

[2]  Jurgen Hasch,et al.  Driving towards 2020: Automotive radar technology trends , 2015, 2015 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwaves for Intelligent Mobility (ICMIM).

[3]  Abdelhak M. Zoubir,et al.  Joint 2-D DOA Estimation and Phase Calibration for Uniform Rectangular Arrays , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[4]  Anthony J. Weiss,et al.  Direction finding in the presence of mutual coupling , 1991 .

[5]  Athanassios Manikas,et al.  Modelling and estimation of mutual coupling between array elements , 1994, Proceedings of ICASSP '94. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[6]  A.G. Jaffer.  Constrained mutual coupling estimation for array calibration , 2001, Conference Record of Thirty-Fifth Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (Cat.No.01CH37256).

[7]  T. Zwick,et al.  Millimeter-Wave Technology for Automotive Radar Sensors in the 77 GHz Frequency Band , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[8]  Meng Hwa Er,et al.  A Practical Simple Geometry and Gain/Phase Calibration Technique for Antenna Array Processing , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

[9]  Hon Tat Hui,et al.  Mutual Coupling in Antenna Arrays 2013 , 2012 .

[10]  Bin Yang,et al.  Local and global calibration for high-resolution doa estimation in automotive radar , 2008, 2008 5th IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop.

[11]  Nils Appenrodt,et al.  Making Bertha , 2014, IEEE Spectrum.

[12]  A.-J. van der Veen,et al.  Experimental analysis of antenna coupling for high-resolution DOA estimation algorithms , 1999, 1999 2nd IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (Cat. No.99EX304).