Metawave - Perception Sensing Advancements for Autonomous Ground Systems

As a market leader in long-range all-weather radar development, Metawave has developed a solution directly suited to address the Army’s objectives related to autonomous mobility. Specifically, by being first to develop, patent, and demonstrate the first 77GHz beamformer “MARCONI” chip in a fully functional radar system targeting highly automated to fully autonomous ground vehicles, such as cars, trucks, trains, etc. Metawave not only was able to extend current radars ranges by 2x-5x, but also operate in dense multipath environment when others failed. Fig 1 illustrates Metawave Carson radar specification that will be released to automotive and trucking customers this summer. The scope of the proposed Phase II project will aim to address all four Army challenge areas in the fowling ways: Off Road Sensing: Using trained HUDSON radar at the edge and ANTHEM sensor fusion stack to classify existing objects in onboard library with high accuracy and new objects with dynamical learning methodology.   Adverse Weather Sensing: Driven by HUDSON radar high SNR, detection range are not impacted in fog (2-3dB attenuation per 900m range) and rainfall between 1-4mm/hour.For rainfall more than 16mm/hour range, we expect the range to drop by half. Following reference is used to extract weather impact on 77GHz radars: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/viirpt/sec5.htm.  Long Range Sensing: Driven by HUDSON radar high SNR. Reduction in Processing Burden: This is accomplished in by running radar analog beamforming and MIMO virtual arrays to cover the full large field of view in azimuth and elevation at long ranges. This alone reduced radar compute complexity by at least 10x.  While other sensing modalities, such as IR, Cameras, and Lidars operate in optical spectrum limiting their operations to good weather conditions and ranges below 200m with dense point-cloud coverage making Metawave SPEKTRA radar essential for early detection and perception given its longer-range reach. Metawave has developed an industry-leading unique Modular Software-Defined Hybrid Imaging Radar Architecture that Addresses the New & Emerging Requirements Driven by highly automated to fully autonomous Aerial and Terrestrial Applications. Specifically, designing radars with Marconi AiPs and enhanced HUDSON architecture will directly address the Army’s goal of solving several problems with a single solution. Metawave’s proposed solution will increase SNR by 15-20dB and improve real-time perception enabling which will overcome the insufficiencies of the current solution (i.e. Lidar and EO/IR cameras) and drastically improve autonomous mobility related to the four challenges areas: off-road sensing, adverse weather sensing, long range sensing, and reduction in processing burden.