Patent ID: 7158075

Claim:
A radar apparatus for a vehicle, comprising: a radar means for successively radiating a plurality of transmission waves over a predetermined angular range spread at least in a transversal direction of the vehicle and outputting received analog signals representing intensities of reflected waves received as a result of reflection of the radiated transmission waves by a beam-reflecting body; a group-setting means for setting a plurality of integration groups of received analog signals to be integrated, each integration group including a predetermined number of the received analog signals successively output by the radar means, adjacent two of the integration groups being shifted by an interval corresponding to a plurality of successively received analog signals, which are less than the predetermined number of the received analog signals, so that the adjacent two of the integration groups partially overlap each other sharing some of the received analog signals; an analog/digital conversion means for carrying out a fixed number of sampling operations at a same fixed number of sampling points during a predetermined sampling interval to sample the received analog signals pertaining to each of the integration groups set by the group-setting means and for converting the sampled received analog signals into pieces of digital data; a digital data integration means for integrating the pieces of digital data produced by the analog/digital conversion means at the same sampling point as a result of analog/digital conversion of the received analog signals pertaining to each of the integration groups; a detection means for detecting the beam-reflecting body based on an integration result produced by the digital-data integration means at each of the sampling points as a result of integrating the pieces of digital data; and a delay-time adjustment means for adjusting a delay time of a timing to start the sampling operations carried out by the analog/digital conversion means to sample the received analog signals as a delay time relative to a timing to radiate the transmission waves by the radar means.