A Game Engine Based Millimeter Wave Radar Simulation

A well-known possibility to develop and test unmanned aerial vehicles is the simulation of vehicles and environment in commercial game engines. The simulation of sensors adds valuable capabilities to these simulations. This paper aims to present a millimeter wave radar implementation for the AirSim plugin in Unreal Engine. To obtain the radar response, we use Unreal Engine and AirSim rendering outputs of surfaces normal components, semantic segmentation of various objects in the scene, and depth distance from the camera. In particular, we calculate the radar cross section for each object present in the scene separately, being thus able to have different material characteristics for different entities. To compute the power return, we take into account atmospheric attenuation of the signal, based on wavelength of the radar wave, the gain of the antenna of the radar, and the transmitted power. For greater realism we add noise in different stages of the simulation. Future works to improve the usability and the performance of the simulator are presented.