Testing of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) often requires the use of a surrogate vehicle to represent a real vehicle in conflict scenarios. Use of a surrogate vehicle is required if there is a potential for a collision during testing. In order to ensure that the test results are representative of what will occur on the road, the surrogate vehicle should appear to the test vehicle as a real car.

This paper describes a method and equipment developed for measuring and analyzing the radar signature of typical vehicles and surrogate targets. The method was then applied to eight small passenger cars to better understand what the radar signature of representative passenger vehicles are.

A special-purpose trolley was designed to serve as a portable, self-contained measurement, data acquisition and power platform. It consists of a wheeled trolley base and a vertical structure to which the various equipment are attached. The sensor trolley has 3 retractable feet that are used to make it a stationary device during measurements. The front two feet can be used for fine roll adjustment and the rear foot can be used for fine pitch adjustment. Mounted to the trolley are a commercial production 6-77 GHz RADAR sensor, a sensor bracket with roll angle level and scope sight, a data acquisition system, a laptop computer, a 12 volt battery and a power distribution box.

Eight small passenger cars were measured, three sedans, three hatchbacks, and two microcars. Small passenger cars may represent a worst case in terms of vehicle visibility. The representative vehicle radar measurements were made taken from five viewing angles and at three distances for each angle. The data from these measurements are presented.