Communications of the ACM
Rice Engineering Students Create Real-Time 3D Radar System
A new dynamic radar and digital imaging system was awarded the top prize of Excellence in Engineering, as well as the Willy Revolution Award for innovation in Engineering Design, at Rice University's annual Engineering Design Showcase.
Credit: Rice University
Rice University researchers have developed the dynamic radar and digital imaging system (DRADIS), an impulse-based radar for real-time three-dimensional (3D) imaging that was recently awarded the top prize of Excellence in Engineering as well as the Willy Revolution Award for innovation in Engineering Design at Rice University's annual Engineering Design Showcase.
The system was designed as a proof of concept for a next-generation collision-avoidance system for the automotive industry.
The system features 16 pulse-radar antennae that feed data to a high-end gaming graphics card that uses more than 2,000 processing cores to complete about 1 trillion calculations a second. The DRADIS system uses short bursts of low-power microwaves at a frequency around 10 gigahertz, and the bursts' large bandwidth means the reflected signals contain a large amount of information about the target.
The researchers also built 16 circuit boards for each transceiver, as well as the backplane circuit board, which enables the transceivers to communicate with the field programmable gate array and remain synchronized within three-trillionths of a second. The team also wrote more than 10,000 lines of computer code.
Rice professor Aydin Babakhani says DRADIS also demonstrates what might be accomplished using research-grade transceivers that work at more exotic wavelengths, such as the terahertz range.
From Rice University
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