SoylentNews

Autonomous Vehicle Int'l reports on new work from UCSD:
https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/news/adas/university-researchers-develop-improved-radar-imaging-system.html [autonomousvehicleinternational.com]
The link includes a short video of the system being tested in fog.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego say they have developed a way to improve the imaging capability of existing radar sensors, so that they accurately predict the shape and size of objects in a scene.

“It’s a lidar-like radar,” explained Dinesh Bharadia, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “It’s an inexpensive approach to achieving bad weather perception in self-driving cars. Fusing lidar and radar can also be done with our techniques, but radars are cheap. This way, we don’t need to use expensive lidars.”

The system consists of two radar sensors placed on the hood of a vehicle and spaced an average car’s width apart (1.5m). Having two radar sensors arranged this way is key — they give the system a wider field of view and provide more detail than a single radar sensor.

During test drives on clear days and nights, its developers claim the system performed as well as a lidar sensor at determining the dimensions of cars moving in traffic. Its performance did not change in tests simulating foggy weather. The team ‘hid’ another vehicle using a fog machine and say the system accurately predicted its 3D geometry. The lidar sensor to all practical purposes failed this test.

More details in the article including a brief description of the work required to fuse the two radar images--which they claim hasn't been done before (at least not for the consumer market). One of the big improvements was in rejecting random noise normally present in a radar echo. Another comment is that fusing the radar data with normal camera data (really cheap) could be a good match.

Maybe Elon was right after all (he rejected Lidar in his Autonomous press conference)?

Got Lidar stock? Maybe time to unload...

Original Submission