Multifunctional millimeter wave radar sensor for vehicle applications

Important aspects in future automotive concepts are comfort, reduced energy consumption and particularly improved safety. To optimize these points a precise sensing of the vehicle parameters and the environmental conditions is necessary. For example the velocity of a vehicle, the tilt angle, the height above ground and especially for active distance control and for autonomous driving the road condition have to be known. Well suited to carry out these tasks are radar sensors in the millimeter wave range. However, separate sensors for each purpose are uneconomic. Thus the merging of such sensor types to one multifunctional sensor is needed. Therefore a millimeter wave radar system which is mounted at the bottom of a car was conceived to measure the mentioned values and to get information about the road condition.