3 ms·
This is not a RADAR problem, it’s a world modeling problem. So you’re sending out pulses and listening for echos, which tells you how far away something is in
by saalweachter 9y ago
This is not a RADAR problem, it’s a world modeling problem.
So you’re sending out pulses and listening for echos, which tells you how far away something is in a particular direction. You correlate subsequent pulses to say whether the object is moving toward you or away. If you have a car 50 m ahead of you every time you ping, everything is good. Now that car suddenly swerves around a car stopped in front of it, and your ping off that object says 60 m. A crash is less likely, your model thinks! The object in front of you is rapidly speeding away! By the time it realizes it isn’t, boom, crash.
- adamlett 9y agoThat’s not how it works in my limited understanding. Radars don’t just detect the positions of object, but also their relative speed. For this, they take advantage of the Doppler effect. When a pulse gets reflected, its frequency rises if the object is moving towards the radar, and falls if it’s moving away.
- saalweachter 9y agoYou could be right, either in this case or other cases. I'm entirely inferring what autos are doing based on their failure case (not detecting stationary cars when the car in front of you swerves around them); that sounds a helluva lot like mistaking the new car for the old. Again, not saying it's a limitation of RADAR; it sounds like a deficiency in the way they're using it.
- hexane360 9y agoAlthough there's an inherent trade-off between detecting position and speed. Longer pulses give more accurate frequency/speed detection, while short pulses give more accurate time/position detection. This is the same phenomenon that underlies Heisenberg uncertainty.