Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Researchers from Rice University in Houston have come up with a real-time 3D radar system that serves as a proof-of-concept for a next-gen automotive collision avoidance system.
Known as DRADIS (dynamic radar and digital imaging system), the system uses low-powered, store-bought radar transceivers, and its creators claim their work demonstrates what could be possible using research-grade components that operate at more exotic wavelengths.
The device was created by a trio of engineering students (Spencer Kent, Jeremy Hunt and Galen Schmidt), who won the $5,000 top prize at Rice’s annual Engineering Design Showcase, as well as an additional $3,000 innovation award, the university announced in a statement.
Unlike currently available radar systems, DRADIS not only senses when objects are near, but attempts to image them, as well. It comes equipped with 16 pulse-radar antennae that transmits data to a high-end gaming graphics card, which uses more than 2,000 processors to complete about one-trillion calculations per second.
Potential uses in and beyond the automotive industry
DRADIS utilizes something known as “pulse radar” technology, which uses short bursts of low-power microwaves at a frequency around 10 gigahertz. Those pulses have a large bandwidth and can capture tremendous amounts of data about their intended target.
The antenna array itself was built using 16 off-the-shelf pulse-radar transceiver chips, as well as a reprogrammable piece of hardware called a “field programmable gate array” (FPGA) and an ARM processor similar to the ones used in smartphones. The circuit boards and most other parts were custom-built, and the engineers also wrote more than 10,000 lines of computer code.
In addition to its potential as a collision avoidance system in vehicles, Kent, Hunt and Schmidt believe that the real-time image processing capabilities demonstrated by DRADIS may also have uses in the security screening and biomedical imaging fields.
As Aydin Babakhani, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice who sponsored the team, explained, “With security, for example, the full-body scanners that are already used for airport screening are very expensive and huge. If DRADIS’ technology were fully developed, it could provide a similar type of screening at a fraction of the cost, and it would be far more compact.”
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.
Comments