Texas-based radar technology company Uhnder partnered Yunshan Technologies to produce a digital perception radar sensor for use in autonomous trucks operating in shipping ports.

Yunshan is a Chinese systems integrator of industrial and vehicle millimetre-wave radar products and autonomous driving systems.

China Merchants Port (CMPort) is an early technology adopter and is deploying digital perception radar in a fleet of autonomous trucks operating at its Mawan Smart Port in Shenzhen. The Mawan Smart Port is CMPort’s leading project site for the deployment of the latest intelligent port technologies.

“Smart port development is of key importance for CMPort,” said Wang Pei, CEO of China Merchants International Technology, a subsidiary of CMPort specialising in port, terminal and logistics technology that leads the Mawan Smart Port project. “We are deploying the newest digital radar sensing technologies in our fleet of autonomous trucks to enable efficient and safe operation, even in extremely challenging conditions due to rain, fog or dust.”

The Uhnder digital perception radar provides high-precision data to ensure an autonomous truck arrives in the correct position, to within five centimetres, for automated container movement between the ship and storage or departure areas. The digital perception radar technology enables a large number of co-located radars operating within the industrial port to co-exist reliably.

This is a challenge that analogue radar has not been able to meet. Uhnder’s digital radar can reduce the cost of operations and increase safety, both of which are essential for ports to process an increasing number of containers efficiently.

“We designed a perception strategy based on radar output and real-time moving target identification and classification for various bad weather and low-light conditions,” said Christopher Pan, CEO of Yunshan. “For the first time, we truly achieved all-weather, all-condition operation of the vehicles, greatly improving efficiencies in the port environment.”

The digital perception radar generates a 4D point cloud with the ability to detect and track thousands of objects. The high contrast resolution capability enables perception technology to identify clearly closely spaced objects common in the port setting, for example a worker next to a container. The sensor uses a digital code modulation that improves interference immunity performance.

“Uhnder is focused on the logistics mobility market, and shipping port automation is one of the early adoption use cases of digital radar technology,” said David Loadman, vice president at Uhnder. “The exceptional results we expect to see from the partnership with Yunshan will demonstrate how Uhnder digital radar technology can accelerate smart port automation.”

Based on digital code modulation (DCM), Uhnder’s fully software-defined radar-on-chip (RoC) and sensor modules enable high-resolution digital perception for ADAS, autonomous vehicles and logistics automation systems. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Uhnder is a supplier of digital imaging radar chips and systems.