Modern automobiles are equipped with ingenious safety systems guided by a combination of stereo cameras, radar and proximity sensors.
Radar is prevalent in safety, navigation and driver assistance systems thanks to its high precision and exceptional scalability. With proven EM simulators like Ansys HFSS and Ansys HFSS SBR+, engineers can analyze radar system performance in complex, dynamic scenarios and improve the accuracy of their response to potential hazards. These simulations are critical in designing, testing and validating many aspects of radar systems.
Engineers can use Ansys HFSS and SBR+ to design radar systems in the 24 GHz or 77 GHz radar bands. These systems can be used for functions like autonomous cruise control, collision avoidance, cross-traffic alerts, parking assistance, blind spot detection, pedestrian detection, emergency braking, etc.
As an example, HFSS and SBR+ enables engineers to create antennas for long-range radar systems working at 77 GHz based on finite element methods and accelerated shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) methods.
HFSS and SBR+ are ideal tools to design high fidelity parametric antenna arrays and analyze their installed performance by mounting them on vehicle bumpers made of the latest and greatest materials. The proximity of the radome to the dielectric de-tunes the antennas and distorts the far-field patterns. HFSS SBR+ includes antenna blockage support and a user-defined transmission/reflection boundary to solve these simulations faster and more accurately. This is tremendously useful for upfront design. SBR+ uses ray tracing to model the array interaction with the vehicle and predict the installed antenna pattern. Strong vehicle scattering can cause antenna radiation pattern side-lobes to rise and multiply. Main beam shift, shape distortion, gain loss, depolarization and side-lobe levels — all these critical metrics in modelling the performance of a long-range radar can be analysed and studied thoroughly in HFSS and SBR+.
Ansys HFSS and SBR+ are powerful tools for studying automotive radar systems with geometries ranging from sub-wavelength to thousands of wavelengths. Ansys electromagnetic simulations empower companies to develop innovative, effective and reliable automotive radar systems. Advanced simulations from Ansys HFSS and SBR+ can help companies meet the increasing demands for automation involving car radar systems.
Features:
With Ansys HFSS and SBR+ you can:
- Design parametric antenna arrays.
- Analyse installed antenna performance.
- Model radiation interaction with fascia.
- Predict scattering.
- Simulate driving scenarios.
- Analyse antenna blockage.
- Define a transmission/reflection boundary.
Autonomous Vehicle Radar: Improving Radar Performance with Simulation
As the world draws near to the reality of fully autonomous automobiles and transport vehicles, there is a great deal of focus on the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and rapid automated decision-making. These solutions are aimed at duplicating — and improving upon — a human’s ability to perceive the world around them and at efficiently and safely guiding a vehicle through a journey. A critical aspect of autonomous vehicle control is the continued evolution of vehicle sensors — the eyes and ears of the control system that perceive the operational characteristics of the vehicle and the environment around us. While the AI and decision-making systems must plan the vehicle trajectory and response to the environment, the sensors must feed the control systems executing those algorithms with accurate data on the current and developing state of the vehicle’s surroundings. The development of accurate algorithms depends in part upon the availability of accurate sensor data.