Ground vehicle target signature identification with cognitive automotive radar using 24–25 and 76–77 GHz bands

The authors present cognitive automotive radar (CARr) as a significant capability to the sensing technology suite of autonomous driving vehicles. CARr is a closed-loop intelligent radar system utilising the automotive frequency bands of 24-25 and 76-77 GHz for the purposes of ground vehicle target signature identification. The authors consider specific cases of ground vehicle recognition and ground vehicle class identification in the presence of aspect angle uncertainty using forward-looking automotive radar. The transmit-adaptive waveforms are based from signal-to-noise ratio and mutual information optimisation metrics. In this study, two new adaptive waveform techniques with the flexibility to accommodate angular uncertainty probability distributions are introduced. The classification performance of these new waveforms is compared against the receive-adaptive wideband pulsed and other transmit-adaptive waveforms in the presence of angular uncertainties characterised by the uniform and truncated normal distributions. To ensure the validity of results, high-fidelity electromagnetic simulated radar cross-section signatures generated from scaled-to-true-physical-size ground vehicle computer-aided design models are utilised.