Platoon characteristics of automatic vehicle speed control for vehicles equipped with DS-UWB radar

A vehicular radar is an essential device for reducing traffic accidents. Direct sequence ultra wideband (DS-UWB) radar has been studied in recent years as a kind of radar enabling high-precision ranging. In this paper, we assume that all vehicles are equipped with the DS-UWB radar in the platoon environment. The purpose of this paper is to show the platoon characteristics when automatic speed control is applied with DS-UWB. Additionally, we propose DS-UWB radar using variable length of spreading codes. The proposal is evaluated by computer simulations. Some simulation results show that not only ranging time could be improved by the proposed system but also trade-off between processing time and vehicle following accuracy.