Real-Time 3D Radar System for Automotive Collision Avoidance
A real-time 3D radar system called D.R.A.D.I.S., which was designed by Rice University engineering students as a concept for a next-generation collision-avoidance system for the automotive industry, won the $5,000 top prize at Rice's 2015 Engineering Design Showcase. Current radar systems in cars sense when objects are near, but they do not attempt to image them. D.R.A.D.I.S. does. Its 16 pulse-radar antennae feed data to a high-end gaming graphics card that uses more than 2,000 processing cores to complete about a trillion calculations per second. The system's 'pulse radar' technology uses short bursts of low-power microwaves at a frequency around 10 gigahertz. The power level is about 10 million times less than a cellphone, which means the pulses travel only a short distance. But because they are pulses, they have a very large bandwidth, which means the reflected signals contain a great deal of information about the target. D.R.A.D.I.S. could also have wider applications in security screening and biomedical imaging.
Transcript
00:00:00 [Music] for excellence in engineering first place engineering design award for 2015 so this was the top scoring team across all of the teams in every category this award goes to drus what we've built is a 3D radar video camera and for those who are maybe more Tech technically inclined um it's a multiple input multiple output array of
00:00:37 uh 16 individual radar transceivers that we've built custom hardware and software for from the bottom up we have been looking into 3D radar Imaging but one of the really interesting thing in this project is to do that in real time and not many people really have done that in real time so in terms of application we are looking into security Imaging that's one of the big
00:01:00 ons the ones that you see at the airports they are very expensive they're huge and in future in the next 5 years that could be replaced with uh systems like this one Automotive radar is another one you need fast realtime processing that's a growing industry medical application is one of the interesting ones as well so it can potentially replace x-rays that are
00:01:23 ionizing it can change your DNA these ones are very low power very safe and if it works in medical application that could be a major success the way that the uh whole system works is that we have a little computer on the back of our board that controls all the radar units and it sends all the data to the big server computer that we have that actually runs the calculations and it
00:01:43 requires a lot of computing power when you have all of these 16 transceivers right there's a lot of data coming in it's like a fire hose um and so you have to we you know we Custom Design This this sort of fpga based system custom programmable Hardware system that we can take in data from all of these 16 transceivers and then send it off to another big computer where we custom
00:02:05 designed all of the software as well um and this computer right so this's this big desktop with like you know big gpus in there and we take it take the data in and actually do the processing on these GPU um systems so that we can do it in real time this project won multiple Awards in a design showcase because the group did a very impressive job they actually
00:02:27 build a very complex systems that contain the software antenna Electronics digital analog in a very short period of time so that was why it was very impressive and that's why it won many awards really surprised I honestly like I I figured we might win something because it was I mean it is a very impressive project we've done a lot of work but I really wasn't expecting it
00:02:51 was still sort of a stretch dream and honestly it's unreal there