Patent ID: 7859450

Claim:
A detection and ranging apparatus comprising: spreaders for generating spread transmitter waves; transmitting sensor elements for transmitting the spread transmitter waves; receiving sensor elements for receiving reflected transmitter waves from targets; wherein said spreaders are configured as M spreaders for receiving transmitter waves from an oscillator and generating M spread transmitter waves by spreading the transmitter waves using mutually orthogonal M orthogonal codes, where M is an integer not smaller than 2; said transmitting sensor elements are configured as M transmitter sensors for transmitting out said M spread transmitter waves; said receiving sensor elements are configured as N receiving sensor elements separately from the transmitting sensor elements, where N is an integer not smaller than 2, and enlarge an effective aperture thereof by a combination with said transmitting sensor elements; a receiving control part having units for receiving, from the N receiving sensor elements, the N signals of the reflected transmitter waves which have transmitted from the M transmitter sensor elements at the same time, demodulating by a demodulating unit the received N signals, wherein said receiving control part is operative to split by splitting unit each of the N received signals into M parts and generate M×N despread outputs by despreading at despreading means the M parts using the M orthogonal codes given from a code generator so that the MxN despread outputs are processed in parallel; a direction-of-arrival estimating part for estimating, based on said M×N despread outputs, directions of arrival of the reflected transmitter waves from the targets; and a processor for applying a control input to the oscillator for switching the oscillator output to operate the detection and ranging apparatus as at least one of FM-CW radar and SS radar.