Automotive Product of the Year

Product Name: Radar Scene Emulator

Company: Keysight Technologies

Entry Statement

The vision of fully autonomous vehicles is fast approaching, promising to improve the overall efficiency of transportation systems and enable greater driver and passenger safety. However, making this vision a reality requires automotive OEMs to move beyond the current levels of vehicle autonomy.

That’s why in 2021, Keysight Technologies introduced the Radar Scene Emulator, enabling automakers to lab test complex, real-world driving scenarios, accelerating the overall speed of test. Radar Scene Emulator, with its unmatched level of resolution, represents a significant leap forward for advanced drivers assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle (AV) developers who value safety first.

Keysight’s Radar Scene Emulator employs unique technology that shifts from an approach centered on object detection via target simulation to traffic scene emulation, offering automotive OEMs the following key benefits:
– See the big picture: The Radar Scene Emulator allows radar sensors to see more with a wider, contiguous field of view (FOV) and supports both near and far targets. This eliminates the gaps in a radar’s vision and enables improved training of algorithms to detect and differentiate multiple objects in dense, complex scenes.

– Test real-world complexity: Testing radar sensors against a limited number of targets provides an incomplete view of driving scenarios and masks the complexity of the real-world. Keysight’s Radar Scene Emulator allows OEMs to emulate real-world driving scenes in the lab with variations of environmental condition, traffic density, speed, distance and total number of targets.

– Accelerate learning: The Radar Scene Emulator provides a deterministic real-world environment for lab testing complex scenes that today can only be tested on the road. Its test approach allows OEMs to significantly accelerate ADAS / AV algorithm learning by testing scenarios earlier with complex repeatable high-density scenes, with objects stationary or in motion, varying environmental characteristics, while eliminating inefficiencies from manual or robotic automation.

– Improved scene resolution: The ability to distinguish between obstacles on the road needs to be tested for a smooth and fast transition towards true vehicle autonomy. Keysight addresses this technology gap with point clouds (multiple reflections per object), which improves resolution for each object.

Today, sensors and control modules are tested by simulating environments with software-in-the-loop test. Software simulation is valuable, but it cannot fully replicate the real-world and potential imperfect sensor response. Fully autonomous vehicles must know how to deal with those imperfections.

Road testing of the complete integrated system within a prototype or road-legal vehicle enables OEMs to validate the final product before bringing it to market. While road testing is vital and a needed part of the development process, the cost, time required, and challenge of repeatability makes relying on real-world road testing alone unrealistic. Using this approach, it would take hundreds of years for vehicles to be reliable enough to navigate urban and rural roadways safely 100% of the time.

Current radar sensor test solutions also have a limited FOV and cannot resolve objects at distances less than 4 meters. Testing radar sensors against a limited number of objects delivers an incomplete view of driving scenarios and masks the complexity of the real-world.

However, Keysight saw this problem and knew that this had to be improved. Thus, Keysight released the Radar Scene Emulator solution for use in the lab, a first-to-market full traffic-scene emulator that combines hundreds of miniature radio frequency (RF) front ends into a scalable emulation screen representing up to 512 objects and distances as close as 1.5 meter. Using full-scene rendering that emulates near and far targets across a wide continuous FOV, Keysight’s Radar Scene Emulator lets customers test automotive radar sensors in autonomous drive systems faster and with highly complex multi-target scenes. The solution enables automotive OEMs to shift testing of complex driving scenarios from the road to the lab, accelerating the speed of test versus going to the test track.

Radar Scene Emulator, with its unmatched level of resolution, represents a significant leap forward for ADAS / AV developers who value safety first. This advancement is creating major strides in developing better trained algorithms which means greater overall safety on the road. Thus, Keysight’s Radar Scene Emulator and the Autonomous Drive Emulation platform offers automotive OEMs the ideal solution to realize new ADAS functionality on the path to full vehicle autonomy.