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Radar Interference: Interference Issues Threaten Widespread Use of Lidar for Self-Driving Vehicles
As car makers and would-be car makers increasingly try to build self-driving cars, the problem of radar interference is beginning to show up. Car makers are incorporating radar systems based on Lidar to sense the road environment that the car is moving along. But as more self-driving cars hit the road, interference between car Lidar systems is being recognized as a problem.
As more autonomous vehicles operate simultaneously on roads, the vehicles will be near each other and there will be a chance that radar sensors will pick up radar signals from other vehicles and cause problems by not being able to correctly interpret the surrounding environment.
Huanyu Gu, senior product marketing manager at NXP Semiconductors, said that radar interference is inevitable “when multiple radars transmit at the same time and in the same or overlapped frequency, and if they then share a common visible path.”
Martin Duncan, general manager at ST Microelectronics, told EE Times, “the fact that we have now 25% of new vehicles with radar systems, it is already an issue. If you try to capture in real time road conditions, it is very easy to see transmissions from multiple vehicles. As we are all using the same frequency band this will potentially worsen as fitment rate increases.”
Elon Musk commented on competing self-driving initiatives outside of Tesla, saying that “LIDAR is a fool’s errand. Anyone who relies on LIDAR is doomed. Expensive sensors that are unnecessary.” Tesla advocates the use of standard cameras rather than radar/Lidar. Currently Tesla equips its autonomous vehicles with eight cameras.
Andrej Karpathy, director of AI at Tesla, said that “Lidar is really a shortcut. It sidesteps the fundamental problems of visual recognition that is necessary for autonomy. It gives a false sense of progress, and is ultimately a crutch.”
