I'm interested in your new mmWave Radar hardware, how do I get started?

[josh_elijah]

Glad to hear of you’re interest! This is a new development for us and we are looking for customers to trial our new mmWave radar hardware, and provide test results to us. A couple of things to note.

• At the moment, the product is still in development and has not undergone serious flight testing. Our simulations and initial testing gives us a good idea of FoV and range, but until we can test in a real application, this is still preliminary. As such, we want to work with early customers who are willing to give us test results from real flight testing

• In Radars, the most important initial tradeoff is between Field of View (FoV) and sensing range. A wider Field of View allows you to sense things from more angles, but a wider field of view reduces the sensing range. Conversely, you can increase the maximum sensing range by reducing the FoV. The longest range radar is essentially just a very narrow directional beam. The image below is helpful for understanding the tradeoff (for an automotive application).
  

  

• The largest factor in determining the range/FoV tradeoff is the physical size and shape of the antenna. There are other factors you can do to tune this tradeoff a bit, but ultimately the largest factor is the antenna.

• Because of this, the hardware you choose effectively fixes the this tradeoff. The problem is that, often, it’s difficult know exactly how to decide the range/FoV tradeoff in an application.

• We came up with a solution to this, a modular structure that separates the antenna PCB from the connector/interface PCB. We can then release a number of different antenna PCBs with different FoV/Range tradeoffs, allowing easy swapping to get the right tradeoff, while the interface stays the same via the bottom connector board. Below illustrates what I mean.
  

  

At the moment, we have the connector board and our first antenna board in manufacture. The first antenna board we’re developing is a narrow FoV (74.5° x 12°), longer range (200 meters for 0.5m² Radar Cross Section). This is essentially a long range seeker. Our second version will be a wide FoV (60° x 60°), shorter range (50 meters for 0.5m² Radar Cross Section). This is essentially a wide radar bubble.

With all that in mind, if this is of interest to you, please get in touch with us at info@botblox.com. We will ask you to share a bit more about what you are trying to sense, and at what ranges. More information about your application would also be hugely helpful so we can see if this is a good fit.

[ElsieMichaelson]

Question: Can I use this Radar for measuring the altitude of my drone?

We’ve been getting this question a lot, so I thought I’d clarify where our radar stands for altitude measurement.

The short answer is: yes, our radar can be used for altitude measurement, but that’s not what our first antenna designs are optimized for.

Our initial antenna boards are designed as imaging radars, producing a point-cloud that can detect and track multiple objects in 3D space. They’re intended for applications like obstacle detection, target tracking, and environmental awareness, rather than outputting a single altitude value.

For dedicated altitude measurement, the ideal radar uses a very narrow field of view (something like 13° × 13°) and is optimized to measure the distance directly beneath the vehicle. That gives you a clean scalar output with minimal processing.

By comparison, our narrow-field antenna currently in development has a 75° × 13° field of view. We’re expecting a maximum detection range of around 200 m for a 1 m² radar cross-section (RCS) target. You could absolutely use it as an altimeter by filtering detections to those directly beneath the aircraft, but because the radar is seeing everything within that 75° horizontal field, it requires more processing and won’t perform as well as a radar specifically designed for altitude sensing.

We do plan to develop an antenna board optimized for altitude measurement in the future, but don’t have a timeline to share yet.

If your primary goal is simply measuring altitude, there are already products on the market (many from Chinese manufacturers) that are designed specifically for that use case and output a single distance measurement. They’re generally larger than what we’re building, but today they’re probably the better fit until we release an antenna designed specifically for altimetry.

Hopefully that helps explain the trade-offs!