Nxp B.v.

Feike Guus Jansen

Francesco Laghezza

Zoran Zivkovic

Alessio Filippi

Arie Geert Cornelis Koppelaar

Marco Jan Gerrit Bekooij

Yiting Lu

Michael Andreas Staudenmaier

Ryan Haoyun Wu

Maik Brett

Saif Alhasson

Franz Lampel

Jeroen Overdevest

Navid Amani

An apparatus configured to receive an input dataset,, indicative of radar signals reflected from targets as received at a plurality of antenna elements; define a matrix, A, formed of direction-of-arrival-angle vectors,, each direction-of-arrival-angle vector representing an expected response at the plurality of antenna elements of radar signals from one of the targets; define a signal amplitude vectorto represent expected complex amplitudes as received in the radar signals; define an objective function based on, A and; search for a set of direction of arrival angles for each of the plurality of targets by the repeated evaluation of the objective function for a plurality of candidate matrices based on matrix A; and wherein said search space comprises a plurality of discrete points, z, associated with the direction of arrival angles by a function of sin(θ).

Method and apparatus for determination of direction of arrival angle

Aspects of the present disclosure are directed to radar transmissions and related componentry. As may be implemented in accordance with various embodiments, radar signals are generated and transmitted using both scanning and fixed beam analog signal codes concurrently/as combined for each radar signal. Reflections of the radar signals from a target are processed for ascertaining positional characteristics of the target.

Radar communications with scanning and fixed signal codes

Described are method and systems that implement time frequency domain threshold interference and localization fusion to resolve interference issues in an automotive radar system, that produces spectrograms using Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) for all receiving antennas of the automotive radar system. For each STFT frequency a suppression threshold is determined. Interference is isolated for each STFT frequency by removing the interference from samples that are above the suppression threshold by using a filter. Direction of Arrival (DoA) is estimated for each interference spectrogram cell using measurements from all the receiving antennas. Interference samples are clustered using the DoA into epochs of chirps.

Automotive radar with time-frequency-antenna domain threshold interference isolation and localization fusion

A radar processor for processing a frame of radar data received from one or more targets, the frame of radar data having a carrier frequency and comprising a sequence of codewords with a codeword repetition interval, wherein the carrier frequency and the codeword repetition interval define an unambiguous velocity range, the radar processor configured to: receive the frame of radar data; transform the frame to obtain a velocity data array; apply a correction algorithm to the velocity data array to correct a Doppler shift of the frame to obtain a corrected array, wherein the correction algorithm comprises a set of Doppler correction frequencies corresponding to a set of velocity gates and at least one of the set of Doppler correction frequencies corresponds to a velocity gate outside the unambiguous velocity range; and perform range processing on the corrected array to obtain a range-Doppler map.

Radar processor

In imaging radar, examples are directed to uses of multiple sets of transmit antenna included with transceiver circuitry, for transmitting in a plurality of modes. Transmissions may involve having at least one transmit antenna, from each of at least two of the multiple sets, to transmit continuous-wave energy concurrently (simultaneously) in one or more of the plurality of different modes. Transceiver circuitry may include multiple receive antennas which may be receiving reflections of the continuous-wave energy from various targets. Signals from the multiple receive antennas may route to signal processing circuitry. The signal processing circuitry may respond to the received reflections of the continuous-wave energy by assessing differences in antenna gain and/or phase due to transmit antenna position associated with the received reflections. This signal processing assessment may mitigate or resolve at least one spatial ambiguity in at least one direction of arrival dimension associated with the received reflections.

Multiple-mode radar with resolution of spatial ambiguity

Exemplary aspects are directed to or involve a radar transceiver to transmit signal and receive reflected radar signals via a communication channel. The exemplary method includes radar receiver data processing circuitry that may be used to differentiate a subset of representations of the received signals. This differentiation may be used to select signals that are more indicative of target(s) having a given range than other ones of the received signals. The received signal's representations may then be compressed by using variable-mantissa floating-point numbers having mantissa values that vary based, at least in part, on at least one strength characteristic of the respective representations.

Compression of data employing variable mantissa size

A mechanism is provided for determining an unambiguous direction of arrival (DoA) for radio frequency (RF) signals received by a sparse array. A DoA angle domain is split into hypothesis regions. The hypothesis regions are derived from the phase differences of the antenna element pairs used for the DoA angle estimate. In each hypothesis region, the ambiguous phase of antenna element pairs is unwrapped according to expected wrap-around. After unwrapping the phase, for each hypothesis region, a phasor is calculated by combining the individual antenna element pair phasors. The hypothesis region that obtains the phasor with a largest amplitude is selected as the most likely DoA region and the phase of the winning phasor is used as an unambiguous estimate for the DoA angle.

Method and system for single target direction of arrival estimation for sparse array radar systems

Embodiments are directed to a method for determining velocity of an object. The method includes in response to two interleaved chirp sequences being sent towards the object, processing responsive chirps of each of the two interleaved chirp sequences independently from one another to produce respective Doppler-spectrum data sets, and calculating the velocity of the object based on the respective Doppler-spectrum data sets. Each of the interleaved chirp sequences being characterized by a common time spacing between respective chirps of the respective chirp sequence, and each chirp of one of the chirp sequences being offset by an amount of time that is different than the common time spacing.

Radar apparatuses and methods involving determination of velocity of an object

Aspects of the present disclosure are directed to radar signaling utilizing a non-uniform multi input/multi output (MIMO) antenna array including first and second uniform MIMO antenna arrays respectively having both sparsely-arranged transmitting antennas and sparsely-arranged receiving antennas. Communication circuitry is configured to determine a direction of arrival of reflections of radar signals transmitted by the transmitting antennas and received by the receiving antennas, by comparing the reflections received by the first MIMO array with the reflections received by the second MIMO array during a common time period (e.g., at the same time). Using this approach, the antenna arrays may be utilized to provide co-prime spacing/elements and to suppress ambiguities in received reflections based on alignment thereof.

Radar apparatus and method

A data processing device and method for detecting interference in a FMCW radar system are described. For each of a plurality of transmitted chirps of the radar system, a high pass filter is applied to a receiver signal of a receiver channel of a radar receiver during an acquisition time corresponding to a transmitted chirp to remove those parts of the receiver signal corresponding to a reflected chirp having a power at the radar receiver greater than the noise power of the radar receiver of the radar system. The receiver signal power is calculated from the high pass filtered receiver signal. The receiver signal power is compared with a threshold noise power based on an estimate of the thermal noise of the radar receiver to determine whether the receiver signal corresponds to an interfered received chirp including interference or a non-interfered received chirp not including interference.

Radar interference detection

A mechanism is provided to determine if a short-range automotive radar detection is a direct reflection or an indirect (also known as 'multipath') reflection from a physical target object. The multipath information is further used to perform a height estimation of the object. Embodiments provide a radar system having a range resolution smaller than a path difference between the direct reflection path and the indirect reflection path. Both range separation techniques and Doppler separation techniques are utilized to provide a reliable and accurate estimation of the height of the object.

Method and system for height estimation in ultra-short-range radar

Aspects of the present disclosure are directed to a method and/or apparatus involving frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar signals. As my be implemented in accordance with one or more embodiments, receiver circuitry is configured and arranged to receive a FMCW radar signal having an information signal embedded into a radar waveform, and to indicate a relationship in the FMCW radar signal between beat frequency magnitude and time delay. A filter processing circuit is configured and arranged to filter the information signal in the FMCW radar signal by applying a group delay function based on the relationship between beat frequency magnitude and time delay. Signal processing circuitry is configured and arranged to detect a remote object by using the filtered FMCW radar signal.

Radar-based communication

An apparatus for resolving velocity ambiguity in a MIMO RADAR includes a plurality of transmit channels and a virtual channel Each transmit channel includes a transmit antenna configured to transmit a plurality of chirps. Each chirp includes a frequency ramp of a transmit frequency of the respective transmit channel. Each transmit channel is orthogonal to another transmit channel and to a virtual transmit channel. A waveform generator is configured to generate a local oscillator (LO) signal for each transmit channel. A frequency offset circuit is configured to modify the LO signal of each transmit channel with a respective frequency offset to generate the respective transmit frequency.

MIMO radar coding for resolving velocity ambiguity

There is provided a radar sensor and method. The radar sensor comprises a plurality of transmit and receive antennas, a transceiver, a digital signal processor, a filter and an interface. The transceiver is configured to digitize received radar signals to provide a plurality of digital samples. The digital signal processor is configured to form a measurement matrix by transforming the plurality of digital samples into a distance/relative velocity matrix for each combination of the transmit and receive antennas. The filter is configured to identify samples forming the measurement matrix having a signal to noise ratio higher than a threshold value. The interface is configured to transmit the identified samples and their location in the measurement matrix to a remote host processor configured to further carry out direction of arrival processing on the identified samples.

Decentralised radar system

A radar system comprising a transmitter controller, configured to control an oscillator such that the oscillator provides a transmit-radar-signal a transmit-first-overlapping-portion and a transmit-second-overlapping-portion that corresponds to the instantaneous frequency of the transmit-first-frequency-overlapping-portion. The transmitter controller is configured to reconfigure the oscillator from a first-operating-mode to a second-operating-mode between a transmit-first-ramp-frequency-portion and a transmit-second-ramp rising-frequency-portion. The radar system also includes a receiver controller configured to receive a received-radar-signal that represents a reflected version of the transmit-radar-signal, and provide a combined-overlapping-portion based on a combination of the transmit-first-overlapping-portion, the transmit-second-overlapping-portion, a received-first-overlapping-portion, and a received-second-overlapping-portion.

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Eindhoven, Netherlands

Feike Guus Jansen