Dr. Matt Markel, CEO of Spartan Radar, discusses the role of radar in improving road safety and the autonomous vehicle ecosystem.
Takeaways
- Radar, when combined with cameras, offers an affordable alternative for achieving human-level autonomy in vehicles.
- Radar excels in measuring range and velocity accurately, while cameras have superior spatial resolution.
- Spartan Radar focuses on improving the spatial resolution of radar through software, providing a three to eight times increase in resolution.
- They aim to complement radar hardware manufacturers and provide software solutions to enhance radar performance. Spartan Radar’s software, Clarify, improves the spatial resolution of radar sensors, enabling better object detection and classification.
- The software can separate objects that appear as a single pixel, enhancing the accuracy of radar-based perception systems.
- Clarify has been shown to detect objects that were previously missed by radar systems, including pedestrians next to vehicles.
- The software is crucial for ADAS and autonomous vehicles, helping estimate drivable areas in a scene.
- Spartan Radar’s solution is particularly valuable for commercial vehicles, where aftermarket installation is possible and can address safety concerns in industries like material handling.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
10:41 The Abstraction of Road Safety
17:00 Enhancing Radar Performance through Software
30:22 Applications in Different Levels of Autonomy
37:27 Addressing Safety Concerns in Commercial Vehicles
48:19 Redefining Radar’s Perception
49:58 Closing
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Bio
Dr. Matt Markel has excelled in engineering, technology, and leadership in both the defense and commercial sectors. He created and led the radar division of Ghost Autonomy, an autonomous driving company using breakthroughs in collision avoidance technology to develop safe, attention-free self-driving for mass market consumer cars. Prior to Ghost, he led the radar team at Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project.
Dr. Markel is widely recognized as an expert and leader in radar, especially automotive radar for autonomous systems, Technology Readiness Assessments and Technology Readiness Levels, and electronic warfare. He is the inventor on multiple patents and trade secrets from his time at Raytheon and Waymo, with patents pending from his work at Ghost Autonomy.
He is a published author of Radar for Fully Autonomous Driving, and is now the CEO of Spartan Radar, a radar technology startup based in Southern California, where he has successfully lead Spartan’s focus from R&D to market-ready products.
Company Description
Spartan Radar is a next-generation mobility sensor provider with extensive expertise in radar
digital signal processing and antenna design. The commercial vehicle division offers the
product, “Hoplo,” a software-defined radar for blind spot monitoring. Applications may include
trucking/delivery, construction, material handling, and mining. Spartan’s flagship software
package called “Clarify” is designed to increase the performance of existing automotive radar
systems in a computationally efficient manner.
Keywords:
Spartan Radar, radar, autonomy, road safety, passenger cars, commercial vehicles, spatial resolution, radar software, Spartan Radar, Clarify, radar software, spatial resolution, object detection, object classification, radar-based perception, advanced driver assistance systems, ADAS, autonomous vehicles, drivable areas, commercial vehicles, aftermarket installation, material handling
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