Few technology trends are generating as much excitement as the promise of autonomous driving. As the world moves closer to fully autonomous vehicles, cars are continually increasing in their ability to independently navigate the roadway, follow rules, and avoid objects to keep their occupants safe. While every advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) is different, they all depend on accurate sensors, including radar, to gather information from the external environment and transmit it to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms that create a correct response in milliseconds. While every part of the ADAS is important, the sensors placed on various surfaces of the car are mission critical. Radar-based sensors mounted on the vehicle must be able to clearly “see” a variety of objects ― including humans, animals, other cars, road signage, traffic lights, and lane markings ― under a range of lighting and weather conditions, then trigger an appropriate response, such as steering or braking. If a sensor fails to accurately interpret external signals, the car’s response will be wrong, placing human lives at risk. As with many other product development tasks today, engineering simulation provides the answer. Ansys AVxcelerate ensures that radar-based sensors can be verified quickly, in a risk-free and low-cost virtual environment. It enables product development teams to reproduce the complex physical world, including challenging edge cases, and ensure that their radar-based sensor designs perceive that world precisely across a range of terrain, lighting, and weather conditions.

In this presentation, we will present simulation of high-resolution MIMO radar system simulation in realistic driving scenarios. A full physics-based radar scene corner case is modeled to obtain high-fidelity range-Doppler maps. Further, we will demonstrate and investigate the effects of construction metal plate radar-returns on false target identification. Ansys AVxcelerate introduces a new paradigm for sensor development by leveraging Nvidia GPUs and new algorithms to accelerate simulation by orders of magnitude without compromising accuracy while providing connections to the driving simulator of your choice to ensure the safety and accuracy of your radar sensors so you can shift your development and testing strategies from the physical to the virtual world.