0.1 System Description

The TIDEP-01000 provides a reference for building a people-tracking application that can detect and track humans up to 15 meters away. This design is a custom data processing demo application built to work on the IWR6843, an integrated single-chip frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar sensor capable of operation in the 60 to 64 GHz band.

Human monitoring has become an important area of exploration, due to its potential for understanding people’s activities, intents, and health issues. The ability to continuously and consistently monitor human motion is an important function in numerous applications, including surveillance, appliance control, and analysis. Accuracy and precision plays an important role in these applications. While sensors such as passive infra-red (PIR) and time of flight (TOF) are in use, they suffer from limitations in accuracy, false alarms, and environmental changes such as darkness, brightness, and smoke.

Radarprovides accurate position and velocity measurement of people in the area of interest. They are relatively immune to environmental conditions such as the effects of rain, dust, or smoke. Additionally, they can work in complete darkness or in bright daylight. They are therefore useful for building automation applications such as people counting, motion detection, IP network cameras, and safety guards.

The design provided is an introductory-demo application developed on the IWR6843ISK and IWR6843ISK-ODS to accurately count and track the number of people in the area of interest. The radar data processing chain implements the static clutter removal, range azimuth heat map, elevation estimation, and Doppler extraction algorithms for obtaining 4 dimensional point cloud information. This signal chain follows the mmWave SDK DPM structure all the way through tracker and data output. After viewing this design, the customer should be able to better understand the implementation of advanced algorithms on the IWR6843 device with the mmWave SDK architecture.