Single-Frame MIMO Radar Velocity Vector Estimation via Multi-Bounce Scattering

Radars are widely adopted for autonomous navigation and vehicular networking due to their robustness to weather conditions as compared to visible light cameras and lidars. However, radars currently struggle with differentiating static vs tangentially moving objects within a single radar frame since both yield the same Doppler along line-of-sight paths to the radar. Prior solutions deploy multiple radar or visible light camera modules to form a multi-“look” synthetic aperture for estimating the single-frame velocity vectors, to estimate tangential and radial velocity components of moving objects leading to higher system costs. In this paper, we propose to exploit multi-bounce scattering from secondary static objects in the environment, e.g., building pillars, walls, etc., to form an effective multi-“look” synthetic aperture for single-frame velocity vector estimation with a single multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radar, thus reducing the overall system cost and removing the need for multi-module synchronization. We present a comprehensive theoretical and experiment evaluation of our scheme, demonstrating a $4.5 \times$ reduction in the error for estimating moving objects' velocity vectors over comparable single-radar baselines.