Hi Friends and Partners of Spartan,
I am absolutely thrilled to be the President of Spartan Radar. I am looking forward to working with all of you in my new role leading the excellent team at Spartan.
I feel like I already know many of you in the community, so at the risk of being a little repetitive, here’s a quick overview of my background. I’ve been working in radar and related fields for over 30 years, with the last 6 being in the autonomy and automotive spaces. I started my career developing really cool radars and radar technology for the defense industry, concluding this phase as a Principal Engineering Fellow at Raytheon. In 2017 I left defense and joined Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project, and was the head of their radar program. This was a fantastic experience for me, learning about really stressing L4 autonomy use cases and how radar can solve those across the spectrum of weather conditions. From there I joined Ghost Autonomy. Their focus is on the privately owned vehicle (POV) L4 market, and I created and lead their radar division. Finally, I was the editor and an author of the seminal book “Radar for Fully Autonomous Driving” (Artech House, 2022) – a really fun project where I was able to collaborate with radar leaders across the automotive and autonomy space!
I joined Spartan for several reasons. First, I have had deep connections (over a decade) with the founding team and much of the engineering leadership and have been continually impressed with their passion and creativity. Second, their progress towards developing key technologies and establishing a product-market fit is exciting. In my role as a strategic advisor (before I was invited to be the President) I had a chance to see first-hand how this team was operating and the value and capability of their radar solutions and I was sold.
As we all know, radar is a key technology for automated and semi-automated driving, providing reliable and accurate information about the surrounding environment in all weather and lighting conditions. However, not all radar systems are created equal. Many radar systems on the market today are either too low performing (especially in terms of spatial resolution) or too expensive and power-hungry, as we see with some of the imaging radars. That’s one area where we come in – our software delivers up to 3 to 7 times the resolution of conventional radar systems, reducing costs and improving safety.
A second area is in our commercial vehicle product, Hoplo™, a next generation obstacle avoidance system. In March we officially launched this product, and it is gaining rapid interest from the safety industry, with customers including major construction and mining OEMs, last mile delivery companies, class 8 trailer companies, and specialty vehicles. Spartan is also the radar partner of market leader Phillips Industries’ new Phillips Innovations business, layering our technologies onto Phillips cameras to help Class 8 trucks and trailers reach new standards for situational awareness. The Spartan Commercial Vehicle Division is comprised of industry experts and is raising the bar for safety from radar that has not been seen in over 15 years.
I’d love to share some more information on all these developments with you. Please reach out to me and we’ll get it set up – whether it is a discussion, demo, or purchase. You can also visit our website https://spartanradar.com/to learn more about us and our products.
Thank you!
Dr. Matt Markel
