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New for December 2019. Here we will summarize some of the ways that radar technology is being applied to make cars safer. Perhaps another way to look at this technology is that it tries to help bad drivers from doing bad things.
Knight Rider's KITT the car front sensor was ahead of its time...
This was once called a career killer, by us... but the advent of modern silicon processes that can perform at millimeterwave change the game.
All of these systems are baby steps toward the fully autonomous vehicle.
BSD: blind spot detection This is the sensor in side mirrors that lights up when a car or other object is just out of your normal field of view in the side mirrors. It uses 24 GHz radar on a silicon chip. It does not measure speed of the obstacle, just its position.
LCA: lane change assist. Land change assist uses sensors pointing rearward, and measures closing speed of other vehicles on the highway. It activates when you use your turn signal. Below is a video on how it operates. It must use FMCW radar to measure range and range rate.
RCTRA: Rear cross-traffic assist. This setup upses the same sensors in lane change assist, to detect cars that are moving past your vehicle in a partking lot. This is one sensor that can do something your eyes cannot, if your car is a 2006 Toyota Corolla parked between two full sized SUVs.
ACC (adaptive cruise control) and MBS (mitigation braking system). This is a 74 GHz radar with a beamformer that can scan in azimuth. This was the first use of radar on automobiles and dates back to the 1960s.