Integration of a 2.5D radar simulation in a sensor simulation suite

Recently DLR´s sensor simulation toolkit F3S (flexible sensor simulation suite) has evolved from a mere proof-of-concept demonstrator to a versatile collection of sensor simulations. The main aspect of the software is to provide real-time simulation for sensors like millimeter wave radar and laser based sensors in an environment for testing enhanced vision concepts. We achieve this by making heavy use of graphics hardware acceleration as available in recent computer hardware. The latest addition to the set of sensor simulations is a 2.5D/3D scanning radar. Other than traditional 2D radars simulating such a sensor raises some special challenges when most of the calculations should be done by the graphics hardware. We present a custom solution that extends our previous approach to 2.5D and 3D sensors while maintaining real-time in the sense that the simulation runs at least as fast as real existing sensors.