MIMO Radar for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems and Autonomous Driving: Advantages and Challenges

Important requirements for automotive radar are high resolution, low hardware cost, and small size. Multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radar technology has been receiving considerable attention from automotive radar manufacturers because it can achieve a high angular resolution with relatively small numbers of antennas. For that ability, it has been exploited in the current-generation automotive radar for advanced driverassistance systems (ADAS) as well as in next-generation highresolution imaging radar for autonomous driving. This article reviews MIMO radar basics, highlighting the features that make this technology a good fit for automotive radar and reviewing important theoretical results for increasing the angular resolution. The article also describes challenges arising during the application of existing MIMO radar theory to automotive radar that provide interesting problems for signal processing researchers.