REITS: Reflective Surface for Intelligent Transportation Systems

TL;DR

REITS is a novel RF sensing enhancement system for autonomous vehicles that uses multi-antenna blind beamforming to significantly improve detection distance and reliability of radar sensing.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-antenna design with blind beamforming to enhance RF sensing reliability in autonomous vehicles, addressing limitations of existing systems.

Findings

Detection distance increased by a factor of 3.63

Enhanced sensing reliability through blind beamforming

Ability to sense identification info via switching beamforming states

Abstract

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 can also let the existing radar system sense identification information by switching between constructive beamforming state and destructive beamforming state. Preliminary results show that REITS improves the detection distance of a self-driving car radar by a factor of 3.63.