Detection of pedestrians and cyclist outside a line of sight

Introduction

The number of road accidents continues to increase dramatically each year. Cyclists and pedestrians, being a part of the daily traffic, keep challenging drivers, thus making safety issues increasingly important. Furthermore, miniature electrical vehicles, paving their way through traffic and being in many cases unseen by drivers, put themselves in danger. Improving driving safety, being always a subject to technological efforts, is one of the most important challenges of modern society.

Technological Advancements

Continuously developing technologies offer a broad range of tools capable of assisting a driver in decision-making. Moreover, autonomous vehicles, nevertheless facing a broad range of challenges nowadays, will certainly sooner or later contribute to the endeavor.

Current Safety Systems

Optical camera solutions, LIDARs, and high-frequency radars are already demonstrating exceptional assistance in driving safety by providing overlapping and complementary data. However, all existing safety systems require having an unperturbed line of sight to obstacles. This is a severe limitation, which causes those systems to overlook numerous dangerous events, including:

• Pedestrians stepping onto the road from behind a parked vehicle
• Other unforeseen obstacles

Limitations of Low Frequency Waves

MHz and lower GHz frequencies are known to penetrate material bodies and diffract around obstacles. For example, we have a Wi-Fi signal in an office, even though the router is placed behind a wall in a corridor. However, low-frequency waves are never used in automotive applications owing to the low range and angular resolutions they can grant, as it is commonly believed.

Bypassing Limitations

While this statement is almost a ground truth in the field, it can be bypassed if preliminary information on an object does exist. This includes, but is not limited to:

1. Rotating bicycle wheels
2. Human breath
3. Several other indicators

Project Development

Here we will develop a low-frequency radar for detecting cyclists and pedestrians with a resolution sufficient to ensure road safety and assist drivers in making the right decisions.