"Automotive radar the key technology for autonomous driving: From detection and ranging to environmental understanding"

An overview on state of the art automotive radar usage is presented and the changing requirements from detection and ranging towards radar based environmental understanding for highly automated and autonomous driving deduced. The traditional segmentation in driving, manoeuvering and parking tasks vanishes at the driver less stage. Situation assessment and trajectory/manoeuver planning need to operate in a more thorough way. Hence, fast situational up-date, motion prediction of all kind of dynamic objects, object dimension, ego-motion estimation, (self)-localisation and more semantic/classification information, which allows to put static and dynamic world into correlation/context with each other is mandatory. All these are new areas for radar signal processing and needs revolutionary new solutions. The article outlines the benefits that make radar essential for autonomous driving and presents recent approaches in radar based environmental perception.