Cognitive Automotive Sensing Assisted by Joint Radar and Communications

Automotive radar is mandated to provide high accuracy direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for safe driving, while remaining a low-cost device for feasible mass production. Sparse multiple input multiple output (MIMO) arrays emerge as a primary candidate to meet these requirements. Both MIMO array configuration and transmit waveform affect the sensing performance. In this work, we propose a cognitive sparse MIMO array automotive radar, which “perceives” the road environment via automotive sensing assisted by co-existed communication from roadside unit to vehicle (R2V). This information is then used for co-designing a sparse MIMO array for the enhanced automotive sensing and vehicle to roadside unit (V2R) communications. The bi-directional communications are integrated into the automotive radar, by joint transmit waveform design with spectral nulls for communications and with shared sparse MIMO array co-design for both sensing and high quality V2R communications.