REITS: Reflective Surface for Intelligent Transportation Systems
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Autonomous vehicles are predicted to dominate the transportation industry in the foreseeable future. Safety is one of the major challenges to the early deployment of self-driving systems. To ensure safety, self-driving vehicles must sense and detect humans, other vehicles, and road infrastructure accurately, robustly, and timely. However, existing sensing techniques used by self-driving vehicles may not be absolutely reliable. In this paper, we design REITS, a system to improve the reliability of RF-based sensing modules for autonomous vehicles. We conduct theoretical analysis on possible failures of existing RF-based sensing systems. Based on the analysis, REITS adopts a multi-antenna design, which enables constructive blind beamforming to return an enhanced radar signal in the incident direction. REITS further increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the return signal by canceling out irrelevant reflections from the environment. Preliminary results show that REITS improves the detection distance of a self-driving car radar by a factor of 3.63.
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