Radar health monitoring for highway vehicle applications

Monitoring the health of the radar sensor on a highway vehicle poses a special challenge. This is because the radar measures the distance to other independent vehicles on the highway and the motion of these other vehicles may be completely unknown to the fault detection system. Traditional observer-based approaches to fault diagnostic system design cannot be used. A number of new approaches are therefore explored in this paper in an attempt to create a reliable fault detection system for the radar. These include: (a) Use of inter-vehicle communication; (b) Use of a geographic database of pre-identified roadside radar targets; (c) Detection of abrupt failures using fuzzy logic and a knowledge of vehicle acceleration abilities; (d) Use of a redundant sensor that is inexpensive but of poor quality. The performance of each of these approaches is evaluated. Experimental results indicate that a combination of approaches (c) and (d) would provide the most reliable method for radar health monitoring. This combination would work effectively even in the absence of inter-vehicle communication in a realistic highway environment.