Efficient Algorithm to Calculate a Time-Domain Echo Signal from Moving Targets Based on Physical Optics and the Application to an Autonomous Driving Simulation

An automotive radar simulator is proposed that can consider a dynamic driving scenario. The impulse response is computed based on the distance between the radar and the mesh position and the radar equation. The first-order physical optics technique is used to calculate the backscattering by the meshes, which can efficiently consider the shape of the target; however, because the radar operating frequency is very high, the required amount of mesh for discretization is large. Hence, the calculation of the time-domain echo signal requires considerable computational time. To reduce this numerical complexity, a new scheme is proposed to accurately approximate the time-domain baseband signal generated by the large number of meshes. The radar adopts the frequency modulated continuous waveform. Range-Doppler processing is used to estimate the range and relative velocity of the targets based on which simulation results are numerically verified for a driving scenario.