Compressive Sensing and Its Applications in Automotive Radar Systems

Die Entwicklung in Richtung zu autonomem Fahren verspricht, künftig einen sicheren Verkehr ohne tödliche Unfälle zu ermöglichen, indem menschliche Fahrer vollständig ersetzt werden. Dadurch entfällt der Faktor des menschlichen Fehlers, der aus Müdigkeit, Unachtsamkeit oder Alkoholeinfluss resultiert. Um jedoch eine breite Akzeptanz für autonome Fahrzeuge zu erreichen und es somit eines Tages vollständig umzusetzen, sind noch eine Vielzahl von Herausforderungen zu lösen. Da in einem autonomen Fahrzeug kein menschlicher Fahrer mehr in Notfällen eingreifen kann, müssen sich autonome Fahrzeuge auf leistungsfähige und robuste Sensorsysteme verlassen können, um in kritischen Situationen auch unter widrigen Bedingungen angemessen reagieren zu können. Daher ist die Entwicklung von Sensorsystemen erforderlich, die für Funktionalitäten jenseits der aktuellen advanced driver assistance systems eingesetzt werden können. Dies resultiert in neuen Anforderungen, die erfüllt werden müssen, um sichere und zuverlässige autonome Fahrzeuge zu realisieren, die weder Fahrzeuginsassen noch Passanten gefährden. Radarsysteme gehören zu den Schlüsselkomponenten unter der Vielzahl der verfügbaren Sensorsysteme, da sie im Gegensatz zu visuellen Sensoren von widrigen Wetter- und Umgebungsbedingungen kaum beeinträchtigt werden. Darüber hinaus liefern Radarsysteme zusätzliche Umgebungsinformationen wie Abstand, Winkel und relative Geschwindigkeit zwischen Sensor und reflektierenden Zielen. Die vorliegende Dissertation deckt im Wesentlichen zwei Hauptaspekte der Forschung und Entwicklung auf dem Gebiet der Radarsysteme im Automobilbereich ab. Ein Aspekt ist die Steigerung der Effizienz und Robustheit der Signalerfassung und -verarbeitung für die Radarperzeption. Der andere Aspekt ist die Beschleunigung der Validierung und Verifizierung von automated cyber-physical systems, die parallel zum Automatisierungsgrad auch eine höhere Komplexität aufweisen. Nach der Analyse zahlreicher möglicher Compressive Sensing Methoden, die im Bereich Fahrzeugradarsysteme angewendet werden können, wird ein rauschmoduliertes gepulstes Radarsystem vorgestellt, das kommerzielle Fahrzeugradarsysteme in seiner Robustheit gegenüber Rauschen übertrifft. Die Nachteile anderer gepulster Radarsysteme hinsichtlich des Signalerfassungsaufwands und der Laufzeit werden durch die Verwendung eines Compressive Sensing-Signalerfassungs- und Rekonstruktionsverfahrens in Kombination mit einer Rauschmodulation deutlich verringert. Mit Compressive Sensing konnte der Aufwand für die Signalerfassung um 70% reduziert werden, während gleichzeitig die Robustheit der Radarwahrnehmung auch für signal-to-noise-ratio-Pegel nahe oder unter Null erreicht wird. Mit einem validierten Radarsensormodell wurde das Rauschradarsystem emuliert und mit einem kommerziellen Fahrzeugradarsystem verglichen. Datengetriebene Wettermodelle wurden entwickelt und während der Simulation angewendet, um die Radarleistung unter widrigen Bedingungen zu bewerten. Während eine Besprühung mit Wasser die Radomdämpfung um 10 dB erhöht und Spritzwasser sogar um 20 dB, ergibt sich die eigentliche Begrenzung aus der Rauschzahl und Empfindlichkeit des Empfängers. Es konnte bewiesen werden, dass das vorgeschlagene Compressive Sensing Rauschradarsystem mit einer zusätzlichen Signaldämpfung von bis zu 60 dB umgehen kann und damit eine hohe Robustheit in ungünstigen Umwelt- und Wetterbedingungen aufweist. Neben der Robustheit wird auch die Interferenz berücksichtigt. Zum einen wird die erhöhte Störfestigkeit des Störradarsystems nachgewiesen. Auf der anderen Seite werden die Auswirkungen auf bestehende Fahrzeugradarsysteme bewertet und Strategien zur Minderung der Auswirkungen vorgestellt. Die Struktur der Arbeit ist folgende. Nach der Einführung der Grundlagen und Methoden für Fahrzeugradarsysteme werden die Theorie und Metriken hinter Compressive Sensing gezeigt. Darüber hinaus werden weitere Aspekte wie Umgebungsbedingungen, unterschiedliche Radararchitekturen und Interferenz erläutert. Der Stand der Technik gibt einen Überblick über Compressive Sensing-Ansätze und Implementierungen mit einem Fokus auf Radar. Darüber hinaus werden Aspekte von Fahrzeug- und Rauschradarsystemen behandelt. Der Hauptteil beginnt mit der Vorstellung verschiedener Ansätze zur Nutzung von Compressive Sensing für Fahrzeugradarsysteme, die in der Lage sind, die Erfassung und Wahrnehmung von Radarsignalen zu verbessern oder zu erweitern. Anschließend wird der Fokus auf ein Rauschradarsystem gelegt, das mit Compressive Sensing eine effiziente Signalerfassung und -rekonstruktion ermöglicht. Es wurde mit verschiedenen Compressive Sensing-Metriken analysiert und in einer Proof-of-Concept-Simulation bewertet. Mit einer Emulation des Rauschradarsystems wurde das Potential der Compressive Sensing Signalerfassung und -verarbeitung in einem realistischeren Szenario demonstriert. Die Entwicklung und Validierung des zugrunde liegenden Sensormodells wird ebenso dokumentiert wie die Entwicklung der datengetriebenen Wettermodelle. Nach der Betrachtung von Interferenz und der Koexistenz des Rauschradars mit kommerziellen Radarsystemen schließt ein letztes Kapitel mit Schlussfolgerungen und einem Ausblick die Arbeit ab.Developments towards autonomous driving promise to lead to safer traffic, where fatal accidents can be avoided after making human drivers obsolete and hence removing the factor of human error. However, to ensure the acceptance of automated driving and make it a reality one day, still a huge amount of challenges need to be solved. With having no human supervisors, automated vehicles have to rely on capable and robust sensor systems to ensure adequate reactions in critical situations, even during adverse conditions. Therefore, the development of sensor systems is required that can be applied for functionalities beyond current advanced driver assistance systems. New requirements need to be met in order to realize safe and reliable automated vehicles that do not harm passersby. Radar systems belong to the key components among the variety of sensor systems. Other than visual sensors, radar is less vulnerable towards adverse weather and environment conditions. In addition, radar provides complementary environment information such as target distance, angular position or relative velocity, too. The thesis ad hand covers basically two main aspects of research and development in the field of automotive radar systems. One aspect is to increase efficiency and robustness in signal acquisition and processing for radar perception. The other aspect is to accelerate validation and verification of automated cyber-physical systems that feature more complexity along with the level of automation. After analyzing a variety of possible Compressive Sensing methods for automotive radar systems, a noise modulated pulsed radar system is suggested in the thesis at hand, which outperforms commercial automotive radar systems in its robustness towards noise. Compared to other pulsed radar systems, their drawbacks regarding signal acquisition effort and computation run time are resolved by using noise modulation for implementing a Compressive Sensing signal acquisition and reconstruction method. Using Compressive Sensing, the effort in signal acquisition was reduced by 70%, while obtaining a radar perception robustness even for signal-to-noise-ratio levels close to or below zero. With a validated radar sensor model the noise radar was emulated and compared to a commercial automotive radar system. Data-driven weather models were developed and applied during simulation to evaluate radar performance in adverse conditions. While water sprinkles increase radome attenuation by 10 dB and splash water even by 20 dB, the actual limitation comes from noise figure and sensitivity of the receiver. The additional signal attenuation that can be handled by the proposed compressive sensing noise radar system proved to be even up to 60 dB, which ensures a high robustness of the receiver during adverse weather and environment conditions. Besides robustness, interference is also considered. On the one hand the increased robustness towards interference of the noise radar system is demonstrated. On the other hand, the impact on existing automotive radar systems is evaluated and strategies to mitigate the impact are presented. The structure of the thesis is the following. After introducing basic principles and methods for automotive radar systems, the theory and metrics of Compressive Sensing is presented. Furthermore some particular aspects are highlighted such as environmental conditions, different radar architectures and interference. The state of the art provides an overview on Compressive Sensing approaches and implementations with focus on radar. In addition, it covers automotive radar and noise radar related aspects. The main part starts with presenting different approaches on making use of Compressive Sensing for automotive radar systems, that are capable of either improving or extending radar signal acquisition and perception. Afterwards the focus is put on a noise radar system that uses Compressive Sensing for an efficient signal acquisition and reconstruction. It was analyzed using different Compressive Sensing metrics and evaluated in a proof-of-concept simulation. With an emulation of the noise radar system the feasibility of the Compressive Sensing signal acquisition and processing was demonstrated in a more realistic scenario. The development and validation of the underlying sensor model is documented as well as the development of the data-driven weather models. After considering interference and co-existence with commercial radar systems, a final chapter with conclusions and an outlook completes the work

Embedded Electronic Systems for Electronic Skin Applications

The advances in sensor devices are potentially providing new solutions to many applications including prosthetics and robotics. Endowing upper limb prosthesis with tactile sensors (electronic/sensitive skin) can be used to provide tactile sensory feedback to the amputees. In this regard, the prosthetic device is meant to be equipped with tactile sensing system allowing the user limb to receive tactile feedback about objects and contact surfaces. Thus, embedding tactile sensing system is required for wearable sensors that should cover wide areas of the prosthetics. However, embedding sensing system involves set of challenges in terms of power consumption, data processing, real-time response and design scalability (e-skin may include large number of tactile sensors). The tactile sensing system is constituted of: (i) a tactile sensor array, (ii) an interface electronic circuit, (iii) an embedded processing unit, and (iv) a communication interface to transmit tactile data. The objective of the thesis is to develop an efficient embedded tactile sensing system targeting e-skin application (e.g. prosthetic) by: 1) developing a low power and miniaturized interface electronics circuit, operating in real-time; 2) proposing an efficient algorithm for embedded tactile data processing, affecting the system time latency and power consumption; 3) implementing an efficient communication channel/interface, suitable for large amount of data generated from large number of sensors. Most of the interface electronics for tactile sensing system proposed in the literature are composed of signal conditioning and commercial data acquisition devices (i.e. DAQ). However, these devices are bulky (PC-based) and thus not suitable for portable prosthetics from the size, power consumption and scalability point of view. Regarding the tactile data processing, some works have exploited machine learning methods for extracting meaningful information from tactile data. However, embedding these algorithms poses some challenges because of 1) the high amount of data to be processed significantly affecting the real time functionality, and 2) the complex processing tasks imposing burden in terms of power consumption. On the other hand, the literature shows lack in studies addressing data transfer in tactile sensing system. Thus, dealing with large number of sensors will pose challenges on the communication bandwidth and reliability. Therefore, this thesis exploits three approaches: 1) Developing a low power and miniaturized Interface Electronics (IE), capable of interfacing and acquiring signals from large number of tactile sensors in real-time. We developed a portable IE system based on a low power arm microcontroller and a DDC232 A/D converter, that handles an array of 32 tactile sensors. Upon touch applied to the sensors, the IE acquires and pre-process the sensor signals at low power consumption achieving a battery lifetime of about 22 hours. Then we assessed the functionality of the IE by carrying out Electrical and electromechanical characterization experiments to monitor the response of the interface electronics with PVDF-based piezoelectric sensors. The results of electrical and electromechanical tests validate the correct functionality of the proposed system. In addition, we implemented filtering methods on the IE that reduced the effect of noise in the system. Furthermore, we evaluated our proposed IE by integrating it in tactile sensory feedback system, showing effective deliver of tactile data to the user. The proposed system overcomes similar state of art solutions dealing with higher number of input channels and maintaining real time functionality. 2) Optimizing and implementing a tensorial-based machine learning algorithm for touch modality classification on embedded Zynq System-on-chip (SoC). The algorithm is based on Support Vector Machine classifier to discriminate between three input touch modality classes \u201cbrushing\u201d, \u201crolling\u201d and \u201csliding\u201d. We introduced an efficient algorithm minimizing the hardware implementation complexity in terms of number of operations and memory storage which directly affect time latency and power consumption. With respect to the original algorithm, the proposed approach \u2013 implemented on Zynq SoC \u2013 achieved reduction in the number of operations per inference from 545 M-ops to 18 M-ops and the memory storage from 52.2 KB to 1.7 KB. Moreover, the proposed method speeds up the inference time by a factor of 43 7 at a cost of only 2% loss in accuracy, enabling the algorithm to run on embedded processing unit and to extract tactile information in real-time. 3) Implementing a robust and efficient data transfer channel to transfer aggregated data at high transmission data rate and low power consumption. In this approach, we proposed and demonstrated a tactile sensory feedback system based on an optical communication link for prosthetic applications. The optical link features a low power and wide transmission bandwidth, which makes the feedback system suitable for large number of tactile sensors. The low power transmission is due to the employed UWB-based optical modulation. We implemented a system prototype, consisting of digital transmitter and receiver boards and acquisition circuits to interface 32 piezoelectric sensors. Then we evaluated the system performance by measuring, processing and transmitting data of the 32 piezoelectric sensors at 100 Mbps data rate through the optical link, at 50 pJ/bit communication energy consumption. Experimental results have validated the functionality and demonstrated the real time operation of the proposed sensory feedback system

Development and Experimental Analysis of Wireless High Accuracy Ultra-Wideband Localization Systems for Indoor Medical Applications

This dissertation addresses several interesting and relevant problems in the field of wireless technologies applied to medical applications and specifically problems related to ultra-wideband high accuracy localization for use in the operating room. This research is cross disciplinary in nature and fundamentally builds upon microwave engineering, software engineering, systems engineering, and biomedical engineering. A good portion of this work has been published in peer reviewed microwave engineering and biomedical engineering conferences and journals. Wireless technologies in medicine are discussed with focus on ultra-wideband positioning in orthopedic surgical navigation. Characterization of the operating room as a medium for ultra-wideband signal transmission helps define system design requirements. A discussion of the first generation positioning system provides a context for understanding the overall system architecture of the second generation ultra-wideband positioning system outlined in this dissertation. A system-level simulation framework provides a method for rapid prototyping of ultra-wideband positioning systems which takes into account all facets of the system (analog, digital, channel, experimental setup). This provides a robust framework for optimizing overall system design in realistic propagation environments. A practical approach is taken to outline the development of the second generation ultra-wideband positioning system which includes an integrated tag design and real-time dynamic tracking of multiple tags. The tag and receiver designs are outlined as well as receiver-side digital signal processing, system-level design support for multi-tag tracking, and potential error sources observed in dynamic experiments including phase center error, clock jitter and drift, and geometric position dilution of precision. An experimental analysis of the multi-tag positioning system provides insight into overall system performance including the main sources of error. A five base station experiment shows the potential of redundant base stations in improving overall dynamic accuracy. Finally, the system performance in low signal-to-noise ratio and non-line-of-sight environments is analyzed by focusing on receiver-side digitally-implemented ranging algorithms including leading-edge detection and peak detection. These technologies are aimed at use in next-generation medical systems with many applications including surgical navigation, wireless telemetry, medical asset tracking, and in vivo wireless sensors

Compressive sampling based differential detection for UWB impulse radio signals

Noncoherent detectors significantly contribute to the practical realization of the ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse-radio (IR) concept, in that they allow avoiding channel estimation and provide highly efficient reception capabilities. Complexity can be reduced even further by resorting to an all-digital implementation, but Nyquist-rate sampling of the received signal is still required. The current paper addresses this issue by proposing a novel differential detection (DD) scheme, which exploits the compressive sampling (CS) framework to reduce the sampling rate much below the Nyquist-rate. The optimization problem is formulated to jointly recover the sparse received signal as well as the differentially encoded data symbols, and is compared with both the separate approach and the scheme using the compressed received signal directly, i.e., without reconstruction. Finally, a maximum a posteriori based detector using the compressed symbols is developed for a Laplacian distributed channel, as a reference to compare the performance of the proposed approaches. Simulation results show that the proposed joint CS-based DD brings the considerable advantage of reducing the sampling rate without degrading the performance, compared with the optimal MAP detector

Implementation of an ultra-wideband transceiver for sensor applications

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is the transmission of data using an extremely wide bandwidth and very low power spectral density. In this thesis, the mereits and challenges of UWB architectures versus conventional narrowband architectures will be compared. Pulsed UWB systems can be implemented with very simple architectures. These advantages make UWB well suited for short range, battery powered applications where a high bit rate is still needed. A prototype transceiver for a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag has been developed and its implementation and performance will be discussed. The prototype is used to demonstrate the feasibility of a pulsed UWB architecture and illustrate the advantages of UWB targeted to this application. The design will be covered from architectural choices, component selection, PCB design through lab experiments and optimization

Position estimation via ultra-wide-band signals

The high time resolution of ultra-wide-band (UWB) signals facilitates very precise position estimation in many scenarios, which makes a variety applications possible. This paper reviews the problem of position estimation in UWB systems, beginning with an overview of the basic structure of UWB signals and their positioning applications. This overview is followed by a discussion of various position estimation techniques, with an emphasis on time-based approaches, which are particularly suitable for UWB positioning systems. Practical issues arising in UWB signal design and hardware implementation are also discussed. © 2009 IEEE

Data Acquisition Applications

Data acquisition systems have numerous applications. This book has a total of 13 chapters and is divided into three sections: Industrial applications, Medical applications and Scientific experiments. The chapters are written by experts from around the world, while the targeted audience for this book includes professionals who are designers or researchers in the field of data acquisition systems. Faculty members and graduate students could also benefit from the book