Navigation-aided Automotive SAR Imaging in Urban Environments

Automated driving requires a huge number of on-board sensors to provide advanced functionalities, from parking assistance to emergency braking and environment mapping for target recognition/classification. While low-cost automotive-legacy radars are mostly used for target detection due to their limited angular resolution, vehicular Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is emerging as a promising imaging solution, provided that the motion is known with high accuracy. This paper assesses the benefits of a navigation-augmented SAR system exploiting multiple on-board sensors, e.g., Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), odometers and steering angle sensors. The results confirm the potential of the proposed multi-sensor-aided SAR system to obtain centimeter-level accurate images of the driving scenario.