Osprey demo: A mmwave approach to tire wear sensing

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate Osprey, a tire wear sensor presented in [4]. Osprey makes use of commodity automotive, mmWave RADAR, places it in the tire well of automobiles to image the tire and then measures the tire wear. Osprey measures accurate tire wear continuously while being resilient to road debris and without embedding any electronics in tires. Osprey achieves this by building a super resolution algorithm based on Inverse Synthetic Aperture RADAR imaging and by embedding thin metallic strips along coded patterns in the grooves to combat debris. Here, we implement Osprey on a tire rotation rig and demonstrate the ability to measure tire wear (with and without debris) accurately and detect potentially harmful foreign objects.