ZF’s Imaging Radar was honoured at the prestigious Automotive Innovation Awards.
ZF’s Imaging Radar received an award in the #AutomatedDriving and #ADAS category. The high-resolution radar perceives the vehicle’s surroundings in four dimensions, including height. And thanks to detailed scene and object recognition with a range of up to 350 meters, it meets the high requirements of Level 3 and 4 automated driving.
The addition of the elevation angle helps generate an enhanced 3D image of the traffic situation, enriched with speed information, resulting in high-resolution environment sensing. This type of data helps a vehicle on a highway to detect the end of a traffic jam under a bridge at an early stage and brake accordingly. The Full-Range Radar also provides information that helps detect the edge of the road and whether there are free passing areas at the side of the road.
Full-Range Radar is an important addition to ZF’s comprehensive sensor set for automated driving functions. With an aperture angle of ±60°, it is designed for a wide range of situations: from slow city traffic to driving on country roads and highways. At 350 meters, the range is quite outstanding. It uses the 77 gigahertz band and the Fast Ramp Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) modulation shared with other radar sensors from ZF.
The imaging radar has a much higher resolution than standard #radars, which typically operates with 12 channels. In ZF’s imaging radar, several MMIC (Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit) chips are combined so a total of 192—16 times more—channels are available. This high information density ensures, among other things, very detailed object recognition. ZF’s solution receives around ten data points from a pedestrian. In comparison, typical car radars manage a maximum of two. The Imaging Radar from ZF can thus even resolve the movement of individual limbs, and thus detect the direction of movement of a pedestrian.
The Automotive Innovations Awards are presented by Centre of Automotive Management (CAM) and PwC Deutschland.
DVN comment
While retaining their clear advantages in bad weather conditions, imaging radars are getting closer to lidars for their better resolution. ZF has still received a production contract for this full-range radar technology from China’s SAIC Motor Corporation. ZF began supplying this full-range radar to SAIC in 2022.
