Abstract
Thanks to the availability of a significant amount of inexpensive commercial Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave Radar sensors, designed primarily for the automotive domain, it is interesting to understand if they can be used in alternative applications. It is well known that with a radar system it is possible to identify the micro-Doppler feature of a target, to detect the nature of the target itself (what the target is) or how it is vibrating. In fact, thanks to their high transmission frequency, large bandwidth and very short chirp signals, radars designed for automotive applications are able to provide sub-millimeter resolution and a large detection bandwidth, to the point that it is here proposed to exploit them in the vibrational analysis of a target. The aim is to evaluate what information on the vibrations can be extracted, and what are the performance obtainable. In the present work, the use of a commercial Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave radar is described, and the performances achieved in terms of displacement and vibration frequency measurement of the target are compared with the measurement results obtained through a laser vibrometer, considered as the reference instrument. The attained experimental results show that the radar under test and the reference laser vibrometer achieve comparable outcomes, even in a cluttered scenario.
Highlights
Moving from our previous paper on the topic [1], a more accurate description of the work carried out is presented in this manuscript, where the theoretical background has been extended and details about the measurements have been more deeply analyzed and explained.Radar systems play a very important role in modern cars since many years, before being nowadays exploited in autonomous driving vehicles
In this work we aim to evaluate the accuracy attainable from an FMCW Radar sensor, in terms of vibrational analysis in a real scenario, in which measurements are carried out inside a mechanical measurements laboratory at Università Politecnica delle Marche
Radar system have a different resolution in frequency, but anyway it is possible to state that the Radar system produces very similar results to the vibrometer
Summary
Moving from our previous paper on the topic [1], a more accurate description of the work carried out is presented in this manuscript, where the theoretical background has been extended and details about the measurements have been more deeply analyzed and explained.Radar systems play a very important role in modern cars since many years, before being nowadays exploited in autonomous driving vehicles. Specific norms regulate the type of radar that it is possible to use [2,3]. The operating frequencies have been moved from the initial 24 GHz band to the 77 GHz one, and the reason of this shift is the increased necessity of larger bandwidth from other communication systems, such as the 5G [4]. Radar manufacturers have moved their systems between these two frequency bands [5]. In most of the cases, these radars use the FMCW modulation technique, because of its simplicity (compared to other modulation techniques) and the use of fewer hardware components inside the devices, which reduces costs and complexity. FMCW Radar sensors are at present widely available in the market, since, thanks to technology advances, their cost
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