WARLORD: W-Band Advanced Radar for Long-Range Object Recognition and Detection
The power of vision; speed and intelligence
​
Today’s automotive radars can’t discriminate objects like cameras or lidars, yet they can operate in all-weather conditions.
Metawave’s WARLORD™ radar is designed to possess the power of vision; intelligence (through its AI engine) and superior speed compared to today’s best radars, enabling human-like interpretation of the world.
​
TECHNICAL EXPLANATION
The current state of the art automotive radars are based on digital beamforming (DBF). In DBF, a broadband antenna illuminates the scene omnidirectionally. The return signals from objects are picked up by the receivers, and then processed digitally to form an image of the scene. This DBF approach suffers from poor signal-to-noise ratio (i.e., poor return signals), and signal processing complexity.
These drawbacks limit long-range operation of DBF radars; limit their field of views; and make them inherently slow. Also, DBF either supports high resolution, or high signal-to-noise ratio, but not both. This significantly hinders its ability to discriminate humans in congested environments (e.g., detecting a child running around in a parking lot, or mapping out a cyclist on a curve). In addition, there is no intelligence, as we envision it, currently integrated into today’s radar.
Metawave’s WARLORD™ radar is an analogue radar, which is inherently fast. It is the kind of high-performance radar that the military uses for tracking missiles (early warning system), but without the complexity, high power consumption and high costs. The WARLORD™ radar mimics a phased array, and steers/shapes a highly-directional, pencil beam in the horizontal and vertical directions. Instead of using traditional phase shifters, as in military phased arrays, the WARLORD™ uses proprietary adaptive metamaterials instead for phase shifting—leveraging leading-edge optimization and control algorithms. The WARLORD’s built-in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) capability augmented by its AI engine leads to true 3D vision, object discrimination, and predictive analytics.