Google’s Ripple Could Bring Tiny Radars To Cars

Google is teaming up with Ford with whom it already has a relationship for the use of the Android Automotive platform.

By Sahil Gupta
| Update: 10-Jan-22 18:16 PM IST

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Google has been rubbing shoulders with radars for 7 years now

Google has been building speed cameras for some time. Remember the hapless Pixel 4 smartphone that came with the solo project’s radar that was used for an advanced face unlock system? This phone was unfortunate as it could not be launched in many countries like India where the 60Ghz mmWav frequency spectrum was not available for public use. In fact, even before the 2019 failure with the Soli radar, Google had been building miniature radar chipsets since 2015. And now it has its latest effort which is not in hardware form but a software platform called Ripple which is basically an application programming interface (API) that enables the use of this technology outside of Google’s device ecosystem.

In particular, Google is teaming up with Ford with whom it already has a relationship for the use of the Android Automotive platform. Ripple was featured behind the scenes at CES. Ripple will unlock a useful innovation that benefits everyone. General purpose radar is a key emerging technology for solving critical use cases in a privacy-friendly manner, ”said Ivan Poupyrev, who was part of Google’s ATAP unit that also developed the radar. Soli.

Ford’s BlueCrusie system already uses outdoor radars

Ripple’s libraries have been added to GitHub and are also a rebranding of its Standard Radar API. Soli’s technology could theoretically be reused inside a car where it offers privacy benefits, as it can detect if someone is present, nearby, or telling a device to do something without having need a microphone or camera. Ford, which joined Google on the initiative, did not reveal its plans but revealed that it was looking at an internal radar.

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