Testing mmWave radars in the loop

University of Texas researchers develop a real-time HIL testbed that beats the incumbents on cost, time and flexibility.

Millimeter-wave radars are a key component of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Engineers know, however, that setting up real-time radar experiments with multiple vehicles is challenging in an indoor laboratory environment. On-road drive testing is thus the typical approach when engineers need to evaluate ADAS systems.

With the goal of significantly improving on this process, our team at the University of Texas at Austin developed a real-time ADAS testbed, its main feature being an automotive hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator combined with a mmWave radar target emulator (RTE) hardware. We believe our testbed is better than conventional HIL testbeds that either incorporate unrealistic model-based radar sensor and target simulation or perform prohibitively expensive and time-consuming testing with real vehicles.