A sensor installation structure includes: a sensor that has a sensing portion that senses periphery information of a vehicle; an exterior member having an opening portion that exposes the sensing portion, the opening portion being configured so as to allow changes in an angle of the sensing portion; and a cover member that is provided at an outer edge portion of the sensing portion, the cover member covering a gap between the outer edge portion of the sensing portion and a peripheral edge portion of the opening portion such that the gap cannot be seen from an exterior.

A vehicle body front structure has: an object detection device disposed in a vehicle front end section of a vehicle to detect an object ahead of the vehicle; and a pair of bracket members which are spaced apart from each other in a vehicle width direction and which support the object detection device. Each of the pair of bracket members includes: a forwardly extending portion that extends forward from a vehicle body member; and a downwardly extending portion that extends downward from the forwardly extending portion and supports the object detection device. The vehicle body front structure further has a bracket member locking member which couples the forwardly extending portions to each other in the vehicle width direction and to which an exterior member of the vehicle is attached.

An object detection device includes a transceiver configured to transmit/receive an ultrasonic wave; a drive signal generation unit configured to generate a drive signal for driving the transceiver; a transmitter circuit configured to cause the transceiver to transmit a probe wave, which is an ultrasonic wave, by driving the transceiver based on the drive signal; and a receiver circuit configured to generate a reception signal corresponding to a reception result of the ultrasonic wave of the transceiver, wherein the drive signal generation unit is configured to generate the drive signal so that frequency of the probe wave changes over time. The device further includes: a voltage measurement unit configured to measure a voltage signal generated in the transceiver while the transceiver transmits the probe wave with frequency changing over time; and a state determination unit configured to make a state determination regarding the transceiver based on the voltage signal.

Vehicle sensor systems include modular sensor kits having one or more pods (e.g., sensor roof pods) and/or one or more bumpers (e.g., sensor bumpers). The sensor roof pods are configured to couple to a vehicle. A sensor roof pod may be positioned atop a vehicle proximate a front of the vehicle, proximate a back of the vehicle, or at any position along a top side of the vehicle being coupled, for example, using a mounting shim or a tripod. The sensor roof pods can include sensors (e.g., LIDAR sensors, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, etc.), processing units, control systems (e.g., temperature and/or environmental control systems), and communication devices (e.g., networking and/or wireless devices).

An ECU of an object detection device stops transmission of search waves from a plurality of ultrasonic sensors when a vehicle travels at a predetermined speed or more, and counts the frequency of receiving waves with an intensity of not less than a threshold intensity for each of the plurality of ultrasonic sensors. The ECU acquires a first count that is a count of the frequency in a first sensor that is one of the plurality of ultrasonic sensors, and a second count that is a count of the frequency in a second sensor different from the first sensor. The ECU determines that snow accretion has occurred on the first sensor if the first count is smaller than the second count, and a difference between the first count and a representative value that is set based on the second count is not less than a predetermined value.

Ultrasonic ranging systems and methods that emit coded bursts and correlate transduced acoustical echoes of the bursts with a receive template characterizing a burst code to determine time-of-flight information use receive templates of time-variable length to improve short-range object detection. The template length is based on a time index measured from the start of the burst emission. The detection can account for a dead zone of transducer ringing following a burst. A time-variable gain that is also based on the time index can be applied to the correlated signal. The length and gain can be adjusted with reduced temporal frequency to reduce computation cost.

Various sensors, sensor controllers, and sensor control methods are provided with model-based sideband balancing. In one illustrative embodiment, a controller for a piezoelectric transducer includes a transmitter, a receiver, and a processing circuit coupled to the transmitter and receiver. The processing circuit performs calibration and echo detection, the calibration including: sensing the piezoelectric transducer's phase response as a function of frequency; deriving equivalent circuit parameters for the piezoelectric transducer from the phase response; and determining a sideband imbalance based on one or more of the equivalent circuit parameters. Once the sideband imbalance is identified, the processing circuit may perform echo-detection processing that accounts for the sideband imbalance.

Automotive radar systems may employ a reconfigurable connection of antennas to radar transmitters and/or receivers. An illustrative embodiment of an automotive radar system includes: a radar transmitter; a radar receiver; and a digital signal processor coupled to the radar receiver to detect reflections of a signal transmitted by the radar transmitter and to derive signal measurements therefrom. At least one of the radar transmitter and the radar receiver are switchable to provide the digital signal processor with signals from each of multiple combinations of transmit antenna and receive antenna.

In various examples, a multi-sensor fusion machine learning model – such as a deep neural network (DNN) – may be deployed to fuse data from a plurality of individual machine learning models. As such, the multi-sensor fusion network may use outputs from a plurality of machine learning models as input to generate a fused output that represents data from fields of view or sensory fields of each of the sensors supplying the machine learning models, while accounting for learned associations between boundary or overlap regions of the various fields of view of the source sensors. In this way, the fused output may be less likely to include duplicate, inaccurate, or noisy data with respect to objects or features in the environment, as the fusion network may be trained to account for multiple instances of a same object appearing in different input representations.

An object detection device that detects an object existing around a moving body moving on a road surface by a TOF method, the object detection device includes: a first acquisition unit that acquires target information including distance information of a detection target on the basis of a comparison result between a signal level of a reflected wave and a first threshold value; a second acquisition unit that acquires road surface information including distance information of the road surface on the basis of a comparison result between the signal level of the reflected wave and a second threshold value; and a setting unit that sets the second threshold value so that an amount of the distance information acquired within a predetermined period does not exceed a predetermined amount.