A High-Precision Approach to Eliminate Positioning Errors in Radar Calibrations

To improve the angular separation capability of radar sensors, large apertures with respect to the wavelength are increasingly used. With the help of MIMO operation, even larger virtual apertures than the physical ones are realized. This improvement in performance requires an extremely accurate calibration setup in order to avoid systematic errors and to achieve the best possible performance of the sensor. Thus, robotic arms are increasingly used for accurate characterizations of antennas due to their high position accuracy. In this work, an efficient method for the alignment of radar sensor and radar target is outlined which is within the repeatability range of the robot arm deployed for calibration measurements amounting to only 50 micro meters.