Software-Defined Radar Testbed for Multi-Target Tracking

Modern-day radar is used extensively in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, air traffic control, and maritime operations. The commonality between the aforementioned examples is the underlying tracking filter used to process ambiguous detections and track multiple targets. In this paper, we present a Software-Defined Radio-based radar testbed that leverages controllable and repeatable large-scale wireless channel emulation to evaluate diverse radar applications experimentally without the complexity and expense of field testing. Through over-the-air (OTA) and emulated evaluation, we demonstrate the capabilities of this testbed to perform multiple-target tracking (MTT) via Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) filtering. This testbed features the use of flexible sub-6GHz or mmWave operation, electromagnetic ray tracing for site-specific emulation, and software reconfigurable radar waveforms and processing. Although the testbed is designed generalizable, for this paper we demonstrate its capabilities using an advanced driver-assistance system radar application.