Development of an ultra-wideband radar system for vehicle detection at railway crossings

This paper describes an ultra-wideband (UWB) radar system designed to detect motor vehicles such as cars and trucks when they are present at a railway crossing. Once fully developed, the detection performance of the system is to be compared against a video detection system in a test at a crossing in Maywood, Illinois. If the test is successful this system may be further developed and installed at a four-quadrant gate crossing to sense vehicles trapped at the crossing island (i.e. the area bounded by the gate arms). This paper describes the problem at hand and gives details of the radar system development to date. With the current prototype, a pulse width of 3 ns has been achieved, which yields adequate range resolution for this application.