The next big thing in automotive radar will be the 4D imaging radar. It has limited adoption but started shipping for production vehicles in 2021.
The 4D imaging radar will generate a true point cloud that will be monitored point by point, cluster by cluster, frame by frame, to help classify (and track) objects, in addition to getting their relative position, distance, and velocity.
The basic idea is to collect more data points and do more with them, rather than filtering.
The current performance announced by Zendar about this 360° awareness are:
- Range: 350 m in frontal sector on 10m2 RCS objects
- Horizontal angular resolution: 0.1° in frontal sector
- Vertical resolution: 1.65° all around
DVN comment
Zendar is a 2017 startup developing high-definition software-defined imaging radar. Zendar fuses information from multiple radar frontends distributed around the vehicle with proprietary Distributed Aperture Radar (DAR) technology to produce radar resolution comparable to that of lidar but at much lower cost. Zendar has raised $22.5m including the latest $4m from Hyundai Mobis.
