Design and Verification of a Two-Chip-Cascaded 4D mm-Wave Imaging Radar for Indoor SLAM
Wogong Zhang, Andras Palffy, Srimannnarayana Baratam, Balazs Szekeres, Nannan Li, Erich Kasper · 2024
Since the concept of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) was proposed and investigated in 1980s, it has been attracting continuous attention in robotics regime. The sensor types applied for perception in SLAM are usually stereo or RGB cameras, also lidars based on point clouds output with high density and accuracy. Driven by the autonomous driving in the automobile industry emphasizing both performance and cost, the 4D millimeter-wave imaging radar becomes a new alternative for the SLAM perception. This work focuses on a SLAM oriented solution merely using the implemented mm-wave 4D imaging radar for an indoor demonstration. The two-chip cascaded 4D radar offers totally 6 transmitting and 8 receiving physic channels in RF front-end. By applying sparse antenna array and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technique, 48 virtual channels can be emulated, which achieve angle separation each of 1.5°on the azimuth and 3°on the elevation plane. An indoor 3D SLAM demonstration has been also done based on real-time point clouds output of the implemented 4D imaging radar.