Project and Research Spotlight

Autonomous Vehicle Research

Dr. Vargas & Nelson Torres present their poster at the 2021 Spring Mech Tech event.

Dr. Vargas and Nelson Torres Present Poster

Over the past couple of years, self-driving vehicles have started to make more headlines and attract more buyers. These kind of advances make our society focus heavily on the global automotive industry. Autonomous vehicles rely on various radar sensors to make decisions based on accumulated data which provides information to enable autonomous transportation. However, it is essential to keep our drivers safe as we continue to innovate in this field. In this paper, we will present the development of a situational awareness radar (ego car) in which vehicles approaching and pedestrians crossing on a highway are detected by different frequencies. Real life scenario emulations are developed using MATLAB. These scenarios will range from free space to multi-path propagation in order to observe the behavior of transmitted and reflected radar signals. Moreover, we will demonstrate the process of this work and discuss what further potential implementations can be applied onto vehicles to improve safety.

Software simulations will allow the team to perfect their software before it is deployed on an actual vehicle.  Here are images from the poster showing radar and visual simulations.

An image of radar simulations for autonomous vehicle research. An image of a driving simulation