Experimental Evaluation of Mutual Interference in Automotive Radars

Abstract

In the recent years the number of vehicles on the road equipped with radar sensors is increased, especially thanks to their ability to support the main Advanced Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS), such as cruise control or assisted braking. This represents a great improvement for safety, but it has a main disadvantage: all these sensors in fact transmit at the same frequency and may suffer from mutual interference, leading to incorrect detection of the targets, which causes an incorrect operation for ADAS systems. However, the determination of the effects of this mutual interference requires the definition of a theoretical model of interference, the design of which, capable of adapting to real devices, is complex. In fact, depending on how the sensors are designed, current automotive radars generate signals in different ways and the interference patterns found in the literature do not always correspond to real-life scenarios. Therefore experimental validation represents the key to understanding and mitigating the interference. In this work, an experimental analysis of radar interference based on range-Doppler maps is carried out using two automotive radars, providing also a comparison with a theoretical model.