Hello, guys. In this demo, we’d like to show a FMCW radar based parking lot monitoring system.

Nowadays, parking becomes difficult. The limited parking lot is becoming more and more crowded. It is
urgent to guide people to find suitable parking spaces in a short time.

Optical cameras used to be popular in parking lot monitoring. However, recently, people are increasingly
worried about its potential security risks and the subsequent disclosure of personal information.

Besides, optical cameras are hard to work in bad weather, which limits system performance and
inconveniences people.

Recently, radar technology has been attracting people’s interest. Radar has stronger diffraction and
diffraction capacity so it can mitigate the blocking effect. Its robustness to bad weather also makes up
for the lack of optical systems.

However, traditional radar is complex and bulk. And it is not practical to install radar for every parking
space.

Luckily, we have FMCW radar. The frequency of its waveform varies with time, and generally increases
linearly with time. Because electromagnetic waves need different flight times to reach targets at
different ranges, the frequency of the received signal is different. We can measure multiple targets
simultaneously based on the spectrum of the received signal.

We use 24GHz data evaluation board from Infinenon kit Position2Go. The main components and
dimensions of Position2Go is shown in the picture. It contains 32 bit ARM microcontroller XMC4700 to
perform the radar signal processing. The XMC4700 takes care of communication with all the subsystems
on the radar module, enables data acquisition, performs the complete radar signal processing (including
sampling and FFT) and communicates the results via its UART or USB interface to an external device. This
board also contains 24GHz transceiver BGT24MTR12. The TX section consists of a power amplifier with a
differential output. Its typical output power is 11 dBm and can be reduced in eight steps down to 2 dBm.
A part of the TX signal is used as the LO signal for the on-chip mixers. The receiver sections have a single-
sideband NF of 12 dB and a voltage conversion gain of 26 dB. The gain of the LNA can be reduced by a
typical gain-step of 5 dB. The built-in quadrature down-conversion mixers translate the RF signal directly
to zero-IF. Besides, XMC4200 is equipped for debugging and UART connection. The debugger section
supports communication between a PC/laptop and target XMC™ device via a UART-to- USB bridge).
Therefore, the UART pins of the target XMC4200 on the radar main board are connected to the TX/RX
pins of the debug connector. The TX pin of the debugger MCU is connected to the RX pin of the target
XMC4200 MCU. The RX pin of the debugger is connected to the TX pin of the XMC™ target device. On
the other side of Position2Go, one transmitting antenna and two receiving antennas are also printed in
the PCB. The simulated loss for the entire RF section connecting the TX output from the MMIC to the
antennas on the other side of the board including the vias was approximately 2 dB.

We use 24GHz data evaluation board from Infinenon kit Position2Go. The main components and
dimensions of Position2Go is shown in the picture. It contains 32 bit ARM microcontroller XMC4700 to
perform the radar signal processing. This board also contains a 24GHz transceiver. It has one transmitter
and two receivers. Besides, XMC4200 is equipped for debugging and UART connection. The debugger
section supports communication between a laptop and target XMC device via a UART-to- USB bridge.
Therefore, the UART pins of the target XMC4200 on the radar main board are connected to the TX/RX
pins of the debug connector. The TX pin of the debugger MCU is connected to the RX pin of the target
XMC4200 MCU. The RX pin of the debugger is connected to the TX pin of the XMC™ target device. On
the other side of Position2Go, one transmitting antenna and two receiving antennas are also printed in
the PCB. The simulated loss for the entire RF section connecting the TX output from the MMIC to the
antennas on the other side of the board including the vias was approximately 2 dB.

The 2D radiation pattern for array antennas of Position2Go is shown in the picture. The antenna has a
measured gain of 12 dBi (simulated) and an opening angle of 19 x 76 degrees.

This picture shows a sketch map of multiple chirps. The maximum bandwidth is 200MHz and the chirp
duration time is 300 microseconds. These two parameters are optimized by Infineon and are also default
parameters. Consider down-chirp and stand by time, the pulse repetition time is 500 microseconds. In
our experiment, a frame contains 16 chirps.

A frame contains two parts: Signal transmitting and receiving time and signal processing time. The first
part contains demodulation, signal sampling and other operations. They are done in hardware way. Its
total time can be calculated by the number of chirps and pulse repetition time. The second part contains
FFT, drawing spectrum and restoring data. They are done in C language. It takes much longer time. To
avoid violation, we choose the frame repetition time to be 0.5 second.

Other two important parameters are the number of samples and the number of chirps. The number of
samples is set to 128. So the maximum observable distance is up to 50m. The number of chirps is set to
16. So jitter and contingency can be eliminated by averaging.

This two pictures are taken in our experiment place. We choose an indoor parking basement as our
experiment place. This is a big, open area. Parking Spaces are in groups of three. Groups are separated
by pillars. Radar is placed in a high stairs.

Firstly, we collect the background data. Secondly, we let radar run freely to get raw data. As long as we
get a frame of raw data, we minus the background data then do further processing steps.