Radar Death Star

Lunewave radar's 3D-printed spherical antenna makes for fast, 360-degree single-snapshot readings that are claimed to beat the slower sweeps of conventional radar.

Radar sensing has been used for various functions in passenger vehicles for more than two decades. Like all sensors intended an automated vehicle (AV), radar has strengths and weaknesses. It's good at detecting objects from long distances of a couple hundred meters or more, even in bad weather. And it has a low cost, which depending on quality and scale of production is between about $50 to a few hundred dollars per unit.

But the relatively inexpensive, planar, phased-array radar antennas commonly used for functions like adaptive cruise control don't have the resolution needed for higher levels of automated functions, some experts believe. That shortcoming motivated Hao and John Xin, the brother co-founders of Lunewave, to commercialize a spherical radar antenna based on the Luneburg lens design created three-quarters of a century ago. Tucson, Arizona-based Lunewave was founded in 2017.