Performances of Micropower UWB Radar Using Orthogonal Waveforms

Radars and their applications were, for a long time, reserved to national defense, air security or weather service domains. For a few years, with the emergence of new technologies, radar applications have been developed and have become known in the civil domain. In particular, the arrival of UWB—Ultra-Wideband technology allows the design of compact and low-cost radars with multiple fields of application. In this paper, we focus on road applications, such as driving assistance with the objective of increasing safety and reducing accidents. In classical UWB radar systems, Gaussian and monocycle pulses are commonly used. In previous works, original waveforms based on orthogonal functions (Hermite and Gegenbauer) were proposed. These provide a good spatial resolution, suitable for radar detection. Another advantage of these waveforms is their multiple access capability, due to their orthogonality. The aim of the study presented in this article is to compare simulation and experimental results obtained, especially for short-range anticollision radar application, using these waveforms in one part and Gaussian and monocycle pulses in the other part. The originality of this paper relies on the new approach. Indeed, this comparison study using these waveforms has never been done before. Finally, some examples of real experiments in a real road environment with different waveforms are presented and analysed.