Radar characterization of automobiles and surrogate test-targets for evaluating automotive pre-collision systems

We measured and characterized the radar response of twenty-five vehicles to evaluate the quality of surrogate test targets. The vehicles are selected form a broad range of vehicle classes and include several that are frequently struck in rear-end collisions as determined by the U.S. National Crash Database [1]. Each vehicle´s response is measured with a wideband, millimeter wave, instrumentation radar at a set of identical angles near tail-aspect. The collected signatures for each vehicle and test-surrogates are fit to a Γ-distribution using a maximum-likelihood estimator. The wideband waveform provides spatial separation of scattering sources for additional analysis. The main result of this research is a process for characterizing automobile responses at W-band, how we use these results to identify good design practices for developing radio-frequency (RF) test surrogates and the impacts of these designs on test procedures for evaluating RF pre-collision systems (PCS).