Analyze Signal Processing Software for Millimeter-Wave Automotive Radar System by Using a Software Testbench Built by SystemVue

摘要

Millimeter-wave automotive radars can prevent traffic accidents and save human lives as they can detect vehicles and pedestrians even in night and in bad weather. Various types of automotive radars operating at 24 and 77 GHz bands are developed for various applications, like adaptive cruise control, blind-spot detection and lane change assistance. In each year, millions of millimeter-wave radar are sold worldwide. Millimeter-wave radar is composed of radar hardware and radar signal processing software, which detects the targets among noise, measures the distance, longitudinal speed and the azimuth angle of the targets, tracks the targets continuously, and controls the ego vehicle to brake or accelerate. Performance of the radar signal processing software is closely related with the radar hardware properties and radar measurement conditions. In radar development, test and analysis of the radar signal processing software on a software testbench without any radar hardware is required, so that the radar software can be tested and optimized before the existence of the radar hardware. Thus the development time can be greatly reduced. The software testbench needs to generate the input signal of the radar signal processing software considering the effects of the noises and interferences, which greatly influence the performance of the radar signal processing software. This paper shows a method to construct a radar signal processing software testbench by using SystemVue, where the noise, interference and other unwanted effects coming from the channel, radar millimeter-wave antennas, circuits and analog-to-digital converters can be modeled, and the input signal to the radar signal processing software is generated. This software testbench is used to test the frequency modulation continuous wave radar signal processing software which is implemented by MATLAB. By using this method, the performances of a 24GHz millimeter-wave automotive radar signal processing software is successfully analyzed, considering the noises. This radar signal processing software shows a very good performance of target detection, measurement and tracking.