RadaRays - ROS package

Rotating FMCW radar simulation based on ray-tracing. This package contains all the tools that has been used to simulate radar data and compare it to real sensor data.

• ROS noetic
• Rmagine for ray tracing on CPU or NVIDIA GPUs (RTX or non-RTX): https://github.com/uos/rmagine
• (optional) mesh_tools fork for visualizations: https://github.com/aock/mesh_tools

Mainly tested on:

• Ubuntu 20.04
• AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER

And others: see paper (preprint is coming soon).

Demonstration of simulating rotating FMCW radar data in large-scale triangle meshes from MulRan datasets. We reconstructed a mesh of the sequences DCC, and KAIST, and added a localization frame to each bag file using MICP-L as described here: https://github.com/aock/micp_experiments/tree/main/micp_mulran. The final bag files are piped to RadaRays. The simulation given the localization is started by

roslaunch radarays_ros mulran_sim.launch gui:=false

The simulated data is published on topic /radar/image. To enable the visualization you will need https://github.com/aock/mesh_tools. Then start the same launch file:

roslaunch radarays_ros mulran_sim.launch gui:=true

The results should look as follows:

Left is the real radar polar image from the MulRan datasets. Right is the RadaRays simulated polar image.

Videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9wBuzh6ev06rcl8ksSnxRtv-7jAkR_wx

Easily customize the models reflection parameters using the following interactive tool:

rosrun radaray_ros radarays_snell_fresnel_brdf.py

Please reference the following papers when using RadaRays in your scientific work.

@article{mock2025radarays,
  author={Mock, Alexander and Magnusson, Martin and Hertzberg, Joachim},
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
  title={RadaRays: Real-Time Simulation of Rotating FMCW Radar for Mobile Robotics via Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing}, 
  year={2025},
  volume={10},
  number={3},
  pages={2470-2477},
  doi={10.1109/LRA.2025.3531689}
}

The paper is available on IEEE Xplore and as preprint on arXiv.

• Gazebo: https://github.com/uos/radarays_gazebo_plugins

• Put every non-ROS component to C++ only repository (https://github.com/uos/radarays) for better reusage for non-ROS projects.

There are currently the following active development tracks on individual branches:

1. dev/flex
   • flexible reflection models for rapid prototyping (CPU-only)
   • Video for Cook-Torrance reflection model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI5j87NQzmk
2. dev/opti
   • automatic material property optimization using the standard RadaRays simulation model

Individual components of these development branches are transferred to the main branch after extensive testing.