Collision Target Detection Using a Single Antenna for Automotive RADAR

The goal of most modern automotive safety driver assistance functions is to avoid possible collisions. Pedestrian protection, predictive emergency braking or turn and crossing assist functions are usually based on two steps. First, the radar provides detailed information on the environment, and then a detection procedure is driven. Because of the complicated environment near the vehicle, this second step is a difficult task to achieve in order to give reliable information to the driver. In this paper, we propose to fuse the environment estimation and the detection step into a simple and direct collision target detector. Indeed, this procedure allows detecting possible collision targets, based on their typical Doppler signature, while rejecting all fixed and non-dangerous targets (clutter). Moreover, this detector only exploits a single antenna, and the necessary target speed vector information is obtained by a second order phase expansion using a long integration time, making the use of an antenna array unnecessary.