Rapid and Precise Millimeter-wave Radar Simulation for ADAS Virtual Assessment

Abstract

During the development of the advanced driver assistance systems equipped with millimeter-wave radar and a camera, testing under actual driving conditions is extremely expensive. Therefore, it is necessary to develop sensor simulation methods for virtual assessment of such systems. In the present paper, we propose a novel method that reproduces radio wave propagation and reflection in the millimeter-wave band. There are two key points regarding the proposed method. One is that we perform rapid 1-pass algorithm by ray tracing using a GPU, which enables a huge number of parallel computations. Second, we perform highly accurate calculations (i.e., influence of polarization) by considering the wave characteristics in ray tracing. In experiments, we evaluate the correlation between measured experimental data and the simulation results for the vehicle. We show that the correlation coefficient for the proposed method is approximately twice that for the conventional method. We also show that the proposed method is approximately 10 times faster than the conventional method.