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SPEED MEASURE OF VEHICLES WITH ON-BOARD DOPPLER RADAR
W. Kleinhempel, D. Bergmann, W. Stammler
Telefunken Systerntechnik GmbH, Germany
INTRODUCTION
Speed measurement with conventionally used mechanical
systems does not match the conditions for modern cars with
electronically controlled all wheel drive, anti blocking systems
and anti slip control. The aim is to get the true speed over
ground even in case of spinning or blocking wheels. One
method of speed measurement which does not take into
account the number of revolutions of a wheel is based on
an on-board doppler radar system.
Optimization criteria for such a doppler radar system are
precision of speed or route length measurement, liability to
car pitch and to ground surface structure as well as size,
price etc. Partly these criteria relate to the processing of the
doppler signal, partly they refer to the analogue frontend
plus antenna and partly they are applicable to the overall
system.
The main task of a doppler radar system is to determine the
doppler frequency which is proportional to the speed of the
vehicle /1 ,W. Simple methods in determining the doppler
frequency such as zero crossing analysis tend to fail in case
of a wet or icy roadway. Also FFT-spectral analysis with
implemented search for the spectral maximum value as an
estimate for the actual doppler frequency is insufficient for
accurate speed measurement 131. More sophisticated approaches
such as nonlinear spectral analysis have been under
consideration, mostly however tests were performed with
simulated data, based on theoretical model assumptions 14/.
In the following the system configuration of an on-board
doppler radar system is presented which is based on
millimeter wave frontends (61 GHz) and digital processing
of baseband signals. For the estimation of the doppler
frequency a novel method is used which is based on FFTtechniques
and on sensor model based algorithms for
postprocessing 151. Here postprocessing means that the
measured doppler spectra are correlated with theoretically
calculated spectra. The signal processing algorithm has
been implemented on two Motorola's DSP 56001 with 24 bit
fixpoint arithmetic. The first only serves as an interface to
the 14 Bit ND-converter running at 50 kHz conversion rate.
The complete evaluation unit consists of one Europe sized
PCB. With the realized doppler radar system speed values
up to 250 km/h can be measured with an update rate of 25
Hz.
SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
To get an accurate measurement of the velocity of a car
independent of the number of revolutions of the wheels and
independent of the diameter of the wheels, we use a
system, based on an on board doppler radar. The system
comprises two millimeter wave sensors and an evaluation
unit for digitally processing the sensor signals (Fig. 1).
Both sensors are mounted in janus configuration at the
bottom side of the car, each transmitting a CW signal with
a constant frequency of 61 GHz. This transmission frequency
is selected to combine high atmospheric attenuation and
low size of components. The transmitted signals will be
reflected on the roadway and parts of the reflected signals
will be received by the sensors. By demodulating the
received signal with the transmisson signal in each sensor,
we get a doppler signal with a frequency
~-v+,.cos[cx, + e]
fdi = i=l,2 (1 1
C
with i indicating the sensor number and
v
a, e = pitch angle,
f,
c = speed of light.
The doppler frequencies f, and f, are proportiona! to the
velocity of the vehicle and proportional to the cosine of the
inclination angle of each sensor. Besides this the influence
of the pitch angle 8 on the resulting doppler frequencies f,
and f,, can be seen. This is the reason why we have
chosen two sensors in a janus configuration, namely to
eliminate the dependence of the pitch angle on the speed
measurement.
The expected doppler frequencies according to equation (1)
are from zero to about 20 kHz corresponding to vehicle
speeds up to 250 kmlh, transmission frequency 61 GHz and
inclination angles approximately 45 degree. The doppler
signals of both sensors are low pass filtered in the evaluation
unit to avoid aliasing and then converted to digital
format with a sampling frequency of 50 kHz and a word
length of 14 bit.
= velocity of the vehicle,
= angle of inclination of sensor i=l,2,
= frequency of the transmitted signal,
DOPPLER FREQUENCY ESTIMATION AND SPEED
MEASUREMENT
Pitch Anale and Vehicle SDeed
To determine the vehicle speed at first both doppler frequencies
have to be estimated. After this the pitch angle
f,,-cosa, - fd2.cosa,
fd;sina, + f,,.sina,
8 = arc tan
may be calculated. Now the actual pitch angle can be taken
into consideration to determine the velocity
O.S.C.(f,,+f,,)
v = (3)
f;(cos@[cosa,+cosaJ+sine.[sina,-sinaJ}
of the vehicle.
DoDDler Spectra
An accurate estimation of the doppler frequencies is the
central point in speed measurement via on-board doppler
radar. Since the doppler spectrum of an on-board radar
system does not present a single line corresponding to the
actual speed but an envelope of various spectral peaks it is
285
not sufficient to take the spectral maximum of the FFT
spectrum as an estimate of the actual doppler frequency. To
understand the problems involved, let us examine some of
the factors, influencing the shape of the doppler spectrum:
- the width of the spectral peak depends on the
characteristics of the antenna, especially on the width
of the main beam and on the inclination angle.
the width of the spectral peak is proportional to the
actual speed of the vehicle. This can be seen from
equation (1) by defining
-
2 ~ f 0 ~ [ c 0 s ~ , , - c 0 s ~ ~
&I = dmax - fdmm = . v (4)
C
- the spectral peak has a rugged structure which
depends e.g. on the condition of the roadway.
- in case of a wet or icy roadway the signal-to-noise
ratio and the maximum value of the spektral peak will
be rather low.
Our way to get an accurate doppler frequency estimate is
to generate a model of the doppler spectral distribution and
to compare or to correlate the model spectrum with measured
spectral shapes until best coincidence is achieved. By
measuring the antenna diagram in the region of the main
beam between a minimal inclination angle 4," and a
maximal inclination angle 9, (Fig. 2) and by taking into
account the attenuation as a function of the distance R(a),
we obtain a diagram which approximates the expected
spectral distribution P(a) dependent on the inclination angle
a. Fig. 3 shows this spectral distribution P(a) for 36 degree
I a S 53 degree.
Next we want to incorporate the velocity-depending widening
of the peak into our spectral model. Expressing a according
to equation (1) as a function of frequency f and vehicle
speed v, we get the desired doppler spectral distribution
P(f,v). Fig. 4 shows examples of the desired doppler
spectral distribution for v = 21 km/h and v = 78 km/h.
Finally this spectral model is compared or correlated with
the actual signal spectrum S(f) until v,, with best coincidence
between P(f,v,,) and S(f) has been found.
Alqorithm for Doppler Freauencv Estimation
At the time of starting or restarting the system the actual
vehicle speed and thus the doppler frequencies of the
sensors are completely unknown. To get an initial value of
the actual doppler frequencies we calculate the spectral
distribution by means of FFT and take that FFf-component
with maximum value. Though this is a suboptimal and not
very precise method it is sufficient to get the initial velocity
of the car.
In the following analysis the spectrum is evaluated only in
a narrow frequency band of interest - the region where the
doppler frequency is expected. The relevant frequency
bands of the doppler signals of both the sensors are
downconverted into baseband by digital quadrature demodulation
and subsequent filtering with FIR low pass filters
including a reduction of the sampling rate. This procedure
leads to a higher spectral resolution at less computation
effort. Furthermore it helps improving signal-to-noise ratio by
suppressing out-of-band interference.
Demodulation frequency depends on the measured doppler
frequency from the previous analysis interval. The bandwidth
of the low pass filters has to be orientated on the dynamic
behaviour of the vehicle, especially on the maximum
possible acceleration. For the calculation of the low pass
filter bandwidth also the width of the spectral peak and the
reliability of the measured f., value of the preceeding
measurement interval have to be considered, othewise we
risk loosing the relevant frequency band.
The filter output is buffered with a reduced sampling rate in
blocks of N samples. Thus the integration time of the
system is determined by
N.r
t,=- ,
fs
(5)
with fs = sampling frequency and r = factor of sampling
rate reduction.
By varying the block length N it is possible to realize high
integration times according to low speed or short integration
times matching high speed. In order to save computational
effort in the case of low speed a further reduction of the
sampling rate (factor r) will be helpful. Next the spectrum is
determined from each block and for each channel by means
of FFT. As an example Fig. 5a shows the relevant frequency
band of a measured doppler spectra where the vehicle
drives with a speed of approximately 70 kmlh on a dry
roadway. The theoretical doppler spectrum which corresponds
to the measured spectrum in Fig. 5a is shown in Fig.
5b. The corresponding theoretical spectrum is determined
as described above.
In order to estimate the actual doppler frequencies in both
channels we compute the cross correlation function between
measured spectrum S(f) (Fig. 5a) and theoretically calculated
spectrum P(f,v) (Fig. 5b). The cross correlation function will
have a maximum value where the theoretical spectrum and
the measured spectrum match best (Fig. 6). The doppler
frequency to be determined can be expressed directly from
the index of the correlation function. Next computing the
centre of gravity in the region of the maximum cross
correlation value in order to minimize the influence of
irregularities within the correlation curve will lead to an
estimation of the actual doppler frequency.
Based on the doppler frequencies fd, and fd2 of both sensors
the actual pitch angle is calculated according to equation
(2). By Comparing the pitch angle with a physically reasonable
limit, a plausibility check is implemented. If the pitch
angle exceeds the limit the evaluation unit switches off
downconversion and takes the whole spectrum into consideration
until a reliable estimation for the vehicle speed is
achieved. This is especially useful for example if large areas
of water appear on the roadway where the reflected part of
the signal can turn out to be extremely low.
MEASUREMENT RESULTS
The realtime implementation of the algorithm described
above leads to the following results regarding a dry roadway
and a speed of approximately 70 km/h (Fig. 7 - Fig. 9). The
dashed line in Fig. 7a shows the course of the speed of the
car, measured by a Peiseler wheel which serves as a
reference for all speed measurements. The second curve in
Fig. 7a represents the speed measured by means of the
algorithm described above. The integration time according to
equation (5) was set to 40 msec, corresponding to a block
length of 256 samples and a reduced sampling frequency of
6250 Hz.
The deviation between measured speed and reference
speed is shown in Fig. 7b. The dashed line in Fig. 7b
demonstrates the mean value of the relative speed error.
For this example Fig. 8 shows the histogram of the relative
speed error. The standard deviation of the relative speed
error from this speed measurement is about 0.5%. Evalua286
tions of various other measurements have led to a standard
deviation of the relative speed error of 0.6% even in the
case of moist roadways. Fig. 9 illustrates the cumulative
probability resulting from the relative speed error. It can be
seen that 95% of the measured speed values show a
relative error of less than 1%.
Intensive tests on snow, ice and moist roadways have been
performed in order to test the doppler radar system even
in critical situations. The doppler radar system shows
excellent performance and turns out to be extremely robust
and very reliable.
REFERENCES
/1/ M. Weinberger, J. Detlefsen: Online Evaluation for a 60
GHz Doppler Sensor for 20 True Ground Speed Measurements.
21 st European Microwave Conference. Stuttgart,l991
/U E. Lissel: Mikrowellensensor miOt Geschwindigkeit und
Weg. HF-Report, 1989.
/3/ F. Mesch: Vehicle Ground Speed Measurement by Radar
Systems. Proc. of IMEKO XI1 Congress, Beijing, 1991.
/4/ 0. Besson, F. Castanie: A New Analysis of Doppler
Frequency Estimation. Proc. of EUSIPCO-90, 1990
/5/ W. Stammler, M. Schulz: Verfahren zur Bestimmung der
Geschwindigkeit eines sich bewegenden ObjeMs mittels mindestens
eines Dopplerradarsensors und VorricMung zum
Ausfuhren des Verfahrens. Patentanmeldung UL 90/46, Ulm,
1991.
Fig. 1 Structure of the radar speedometer
Vehicle
Fig. 2 Geometric situation between vehicle and roadway
10
-60â I
36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54
anglddegrec
Fig. 3 Theoretical spectral distribution P(a)
V-21 km/h ~ ~ km7/h 8 -8 -30 -
* - 4 0
20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
spcedkmh
Fig. 4 Theoretical spectra for two different speed values
thmmicals uum
1
-30 1
â - 4 0
-50
5200 5400 56420 5800 6Mx) 6200 6400 6600 6800 7000 7200
kquemyrnz
Fig. 5 Measured and theoretically determined doppler
spectrum according to a dry roadway and a
speed of 70 krnlh
, ..
287
04
0.2 200 4w 600 800 IOW) 1200
mdex of correlation function
Fig. 6 Correlation result between measured and theoretical
spectrum
Fa. 7a: speed measurement
1
75 1 ::
72
710 5M) 1000 1500 2oM) 2500 3000 3500 4ooo
Fig. 7b: difference between measured speed and reference speed
I I
I I
'0 500 loo0 IMO 2oM) 2500 3M)O 3500 4000
W m s e c
Fig. 7 -S-p_e_e-d- mreefearseunrecme fernotm o na ap edisrye lreor awdhweaeyl ,
v=70 km/h
mean valuc = -0.W236227 40 '
standard deviation 5 0.508899 % r
35 I
-1.5 4.5 d 0.5 1.5
relative speed cmr in percent
Fig. 8 Histogram of relative speed error
meadvalue '=-0W236227% '
08-
0 02 04 06 08 I 1 2 I 4 16
error classes in percent
Fig. 9 Cumulative probability for the absolute value
of the relative speed error