Radar Cross Section Enhancement using Metasurfaces for Road Safety Applications

The protection and safety of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists is essential specially in urban areas. Project CYCLOPE aims to provide technical solutions to integrate cyclists and ensure safety for pedestrians in urban areas. Automobile radar technologies are integrated in automobiles for detection of vulnerable road users to decrease accidents. However, targets such as pedestrians and cyclists can have a low radar cross section and hard to detect. Retrodirective metasurfaces can be a key solution when integrated along side targets to enhance their RCS detection. In this paper, we design a dual polarized retrodirective metasurface at a given angle of incidence. Furthermore, we demonstrate a human model and measure its RCS at 24 GHz using an automobile radar system with and without the retrodirective metasurface. The results show a gain of 15 dBm in terms of RCS detection when implementing the metasurface design.