REITS: Reflective Surface for Intelligent Transportation Systems
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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