Extending the classical aperture determined angular resolution limits of array antennas for radar applications

Angular resolution and the angular width of the field of view are in the frame of Autonomous Intelligent Cruise Control (AICC) critical system parameters. A promising solution which avoids conventional phased array techniques and a large number of receivers is to use an array of receivers and the methods of digital beam forming in order to extract the complete 2D radar information. Angular resolution is in this case closely related to the number of receiving antennas and their aperture size. This paper shows that angular resolution can be considerably improved without increasing the number of antennas and receivers by using several apertures for transmitting purposes. The results indicate that by sequentially using different transmitting aperture locations angular resolution can be improved beyond the classical Rayleigh limits using conventional beamforming techniques. Linear prediction algorithms can be applied additionally.