Radars and their applications were, for a long time, reserved to
national defense, air security or weather service domains. For a few years,
with the emergence of new technologies, radar applications have been developed
and have become known in the civil domain. In particular, the arrival of UWB—Ultra-Wideband technology allows the design of compact and low-cost
radars with multiple fields of application. In this paper, we focus on road applications,
such as driving assistance with the objective of increasing safety and reducing
accidents. In classical UWB radar
systems, Gaussian and monocycle pulses are commonly used. In previous works, original waveforms based on orthogonal
functions (Hermite and Gegenbauer) were proposed. These provide a good spatial
resolution, suitable for radar detection. Another advantage of these waveforms
is their multiple access capability, due to their orthogonality. The aim of the
study presented in this article is to compare simulation and experimental
results obtained, especially for short-range anticollision radar application,
using these waveforms in one part and Gaussian and monocycle pulses in the
other part. The originality of this
paper relies on the new approach. Indeed, this comparison study using these
waveforms has never been done before. Finally, some examples of real
experiments in a real road environment with different waveforms are presented
and analysed.