The project GAZELE is a cooperation with the Institute of Automation and Control of Graz, University of Technology (IRT) and AVL List GmbH. durchgeführt. Our aim is to develop a radar target stimulator, which creates complex virtual scenarios for an automotive radar sensor, in order to test modern driver assistance systems and autonomous driving software on a testbed instead of driving hundred of thousands of kilometres on real streets. While the IRT develops the software to calculate the necessary stimulation parameters based on an environment simulation (distance to target, velocity, radar cross section), our institute is designing and building the necessary microwave hardware.

The requirements that on the one hand targets down to about 5 meters have to be synthesized and on the other hand no a-priori knowledge about the radar sensor - and therefore also about its waveform - shall be used make a analog signal processing necessary, since the delays inherent in digital processing (eg. AD-/DA-conversion) are too large to allow such short target distances.  This unfortunately means a high hardware effort especially due to the analog delay-lines and target emulators. To circumvent this problem we developed a highly flexible and scalable design which allows to change both the number of emulated targets and the target range.

The photo shows a setup for demonstration purposes with the delay-lines and the switching-matrix in the foreground and the target emulator modules in the back.