Developing Affordable Unmanned Obstacle Avoidance with 60GHz RADAR

Abstract

The current state of the art UAV obstacle avoidance requires an array of expensive time-of-flight sensors, LiDAR, or ultrasonic sensors. Novel 60GHz RADAR sensors may allow for the same functionality but at a drastically lower cost. We will review Texas Instruments mmWave RADAR sensors, describe challenges involved with dynamic RADAR usage, and introduce pymmWave, an open-source library for easy RADAR sensor programming. We will then demonstrate RADAR usage in the real-world, demonstrating proficiency for obstacle avoidance on a drone. Using RADAR data for high-frequency applications poses unique challenges and algorithm design choices, which we discuss in the paper.