Road Surface Characteristics for the Automotive 77 GHz Band

Abstract

In order to achieve a safety proof of autonomous driving using simulations, information about the environment has to be determined, which is not sufficiently available until now. This work is concerned with road surfaces and their scattering of radar signals. As it is not enough to look at geometries, as it is already done for many ray tracing approaches, also material and composition have to be investigated. Therefore, measurements are performed using a SAR setup in a laboratory as well as open space measurements using a radar evaluation board on a testing area of the Federal Highway Research Institute. The SAR setup enables a quick estimation on differences in reflection of different test objects. With the result from the latter values for the relative permittivity are calculated for different road surface types exploiting Fresnel's equations. The differences in reflection depending on material and surface structure of the road see in the measurements of both setups are discussed in the paper.