Microwave Journal
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Oculii Unveils the Industry’s Highest-Resolution Commercial Imaging 4D Radars

March 9, 2021

Oculii, a leading provider of advanced AI software for radar perception, announced the launch of FALCON and EAGLE, the industry’s highest-resolution commercial 4D imaging radar sensors. 

Leveraging its AI-powered Virtual Aperture ImagingTM software platform and existing automotive-grade radar hardware, Oculii redefines radar resolution and sensitivity to deliver unparalleled performance at price points several orders of magnitude more affordable than comparable 3D sensors. 

Radar, with its low cost, reliability and all-weather vision, has transformed the automotive industry, powering innovations like emergency braking, blindspot detection and parking-assist systems. However, due to radar’s limited resolution, it has fallen short of the automotive industry’s autonomy needs. Improving radar performance is possible by adding more antennas to sensors, but this approach significantly increases cost, size and power consumption. 

Oculii’s revolutionary approach uses AI software to solve this hardware problem. 

Oculii’s AI-powered Virtual Aperture Imaging platform dynamically sends out an adaptive, phase-modulated waveform that changes in real time with the environment and then encodes that data over time, increasing the resolution of any radar hardware up to 100x. This improved resolution and sensitivity unlocks the potential of market proven commercial radars by enabling all-weather sub-degree horizontal and elevation spatial resolution up to 350 meters around a full 360 degree field of view. 

“Oculii is challenging fundamental century-old assumptions about radar with a full-stack, holistic view to radar perception,” said Oculii CEO and co-founder Steven Hong. “By developing an innovative AI platform that constantly learns from and adapts to the environment, we have radically transformed what is possible with radar perception—paving the road for a safer and more autonomous future.”

EAGLE 

EAGLE is the world’s highest-resolution commercial 4D imaging radar, delivering joint 0.5 degrees H x 1 degree V spatial resolution across a wide 120 degrees H 30 degrees V instantaneous field of view. 

•    Long-Range, All-Weather Perception: Generating radar images with tens of thousands of pixels per frame, EAGLE tracks targets at more than 350 meters, allowing autonomous systems to safely operate at high speeds and in all-weather conditions

•    Unparalleled Spatial Resolution and Target Sensitivity: EAGLE is capable of precisely tracking low-RCS targets, such as pedestrians and motorcyclists, in high multipath-clutter scenarios, enabling autonomous systems to perform complex operations in crowded urban environments

•    8-Chip Performance on a 2-Chip Platform: EAGLE delivers the spatial resolution of an 8-chip cascaded radar (24T32R) on a cost-effective, low-power 2-chip (6T8R) hardware platform. Using cost- and power-efficient DSPs for processing rather than FPGAs, EAGLE consumes less than 5 W of total power and is smaller than an index card, enabling discrete integration options that preserve the aesthetics of the autonomous platform

FALCON

FALCON is the industry’s most compact 4D imaging radar, delivering high-resolution performance in a 5 x 5 cm package that is smaller than a business card. 

•    High-Resolution, Wide Field of View: FALCON delivers 2 degree horizontal resolution across a wide 120 degree field of view and can simultaneously measure elevation of the targets as well. Four FALCON sensors fused together can provide a 360 degree bubble of safety up to 200 meters in all directions and be effective in all environmental conditions. 

•    Low Cost, Low-Power, Low Profile: Built on a single-chip (3T4R), low-power, cost-effective hardware platform, FALCON consumes less than 2.5 W of power and is smaller than a business card, enabling it to be leveraged effectively in a corner-radar automotive ADAS application or an autonomous robotic application where energy efficiency is critical. 

While EAGLE and FALCON are full-stack sensor solutions, Oculii’s Virtual Aperture Imaging platform is hardware agnostic, highly modular and available for licensing. 

“The value of Oculii’s Virtual Aperture Imaging software surpasses anything I have seen in the automotive radar industry,” said Oculii board member Karl-Thomas Neumann, the former CEO of Continental and Opel. “By finding a software solution to a hardware problem, Oculii has built a scalable perception platform that is software definable and continuously improves over time. This is a massive transformation for the radar industry that will benefit all Tier-1 suppliers and OEMs and make our roads safer and more autonomous.”