Unlimited Sampling Radar: a Real-Time End-to-End Demonstrator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time Doppler radar system utilizing the Unlimited Sensing Framework (USF) to enhance sensitivity and dynamic range, outperforming traditional methods through a co-designed signal acquisition and reconstruction approach.

Contribution

The paper presents the first practical implementation of USF in Doppler radar, demonstrating improved sensitivity and dynamic range over standard acquisition techniques.

Findings

USF-based radar outperforms traditional methods in sensitivity.

Prototype shows practical viability of USF in real-time radar.

Enhanced dynamic range achieved with USF co-design.

Abstract

In this paper, the trade-off between the quantization noise and the dynamic range of ADCs used to acquire radar signals is revisited using the Unlimited Sensing Framework (USF) in a practical setting. Trade-offs between saturation and resolution arise in many applications, like radar, where sensors acquire signals which exhibit a high degree of variability in amplitude. To solve this issue, we propose the use of the co-design approach of the USF which acquires folded version of the signal of interest and leverages its structure to reconstruct it after its acquisition. We demonstrate that this method outperforms other standard acquisition methods for Doppler radars. Taking our theory all the way to practice, we develop a prototype USF-enabled Doppler Radar and show the clear benefits of our method. In each experiment, we show that using the USF increases sensitivity compared to a classic acquisition approach.