Welcome

What is ViRa?

ViRa is a real-time millimeter-wave radar sensor simulation framework built over the Unity3D engine. The goal of ViRa is to provide a realistic simulation platform of radar sensors for reasearchers in the field of robotics. A key feature of ViRa is the generation of raw data signals such that researchers can apply, investigate or develop new algorithms for solving complex tasks in robotics. Possible applications of ViRa are in the field of navigation or human-robot interaction.

Motivation

State-of-the-art algorithms rely on techniques known from artificial intelligence (deep learning). Such technology needs massive amount of training data in order to provide good results. Using real hardware leads to long periods of training in the lab, maybe often infeasible to acquire. Hence, training in simulation would speed up the whole process, leading to faster results due to the high degree of parallelism with modern computing hardware. In order to achieve such training and closing the sim-to-real gap, realistic models of sensors in simulation are needed to mimick real sensor behavior. FMCW radar sensors are potential candidates for future tasks in robotics, thanks to their small size and light weight. Hence, it is believed that providing a realistic radar simulation framework will boost research in robotics using such sensors in different application scenarios.

ViRa features

  1. Generation of radar raw data in real-time

  2. Fully customizable radar parameters

  3. Modelling of multi-antenna systems and antenna radiation patterns for beamforming

  4. Modelling of wave penetration effects of non-conductive objects

  5. Embedding in a game environment which also allows coupling with other frameworks and engines.

  6. This project is open-source. Anyone is welcome to contribute!

Contribution

To the best of our knowledge, ViRa is the first real-time millimeter-wave radar simulator embedded in the Unity3D game engine environment for providing realistic radar raw data in real-time.