Thesis Work: Safety Radar System Demonstrator i Kungsbacka

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ABB Jokab Safety R&D department develops functional safety products for use in industrial applications to avoid injuries and deaths. The products that are developed must be free from systematic faults, which means that the development must be state of the art, follow applicable standards and undergo rigorous third parity reviews and tests.

The ABB Jokab Safety product range is very wide, covering emergency stops to advanced safety PLCs. The products mainly consist of mechanics, HW electronics and embedded SW.

The existence of powerful analog to digital converters (ADC) have enabled radar systems relying upon high speed sampling. Modern radar system development is thus focused on digital signal and data processing. Their performance is to a large extent set by algorithms and software architecture. Cost-effective radar sensor modules (RM) comprising rudimentary digital signal processing (DSP) are ideal building blocks of more complex systems: The characteristic of safety systems is extreme reliability, while radar systems traditionally struggles with reliability. Aggregating data from many RMs and processing in an evaluation unit (EU) may be one way to resolve this contradiction.

This thesis develops software of a multi-sensor radar system, encompassing data acquisition, signal processing, algorithm optimization and graphical presentation. The study targets implementation of the proposed software architecture in a demonstrator, comprising at least two RMs and a laptop serving as the evaluation unit.

Details:
• Period: Start at the earliest 2020-01-01, end at the latest 2020-12-31.
• Scope: 30 ECTS for Master Thesis.
• Number of students: 1-2
• Location: The most part of the work should be performed on site in Kungsbacka, 27 km south of Gothenburg (good public transportations).

• Study single sensor raw data, utilizing an existing prototype radar sensor module. This constitutes the basic source of information.
• Specify desired functionality of the control and evaluation unit.
• Propose a software environment of a multi-sensor radar system running on a standard laptop computer.
• Implement rudimentary DSP of each RM signal, mimicking software on a chip (SoC) of each RM.
• Find and realize a method to aggregate several RM signals into consistent volumetric information.
• Propose assessor, or measure of safety to determine global safety status.
• Implement an illustrative graphical 2D/3D-interface for demonstration purposes.
• Describe the proposed software package, its functions, pros and limitations in a demonstrator manual.
• Further define, extend and constrain the scope appropriately to deliver a consistent demonstrator.

• Studied software engineering and development.
• Experience of mathematical programming and digital signal processing.
• Ability and interest of GUI-development.
• Interest in collaborating with the closely related Thesis Work: Safety Radar System Evaluation Unit, providing real input data.
• Dedication and aptitude to write clear understandable technical manuals.