Arbe's New Radar Aims to See Through Dust on Mines and Farms

Arbe Robotics has introduced a high-definition 4D imaging radar built for off-highway machinery (the diggers, harvesters and haul trucks used in agriculture, mining and construction), the company announced on 9 March 2026.

The Tel Aviv-based firm said the radar is designed to hold up in conditions that defeat conventional sensors: dust, fog, darkness and rough terrain. It is intended to support autonomous operation by improving object detection, collision avoidance and situational awareness. Arbe said the system delivers ultra-high resolution, wide field-of-view coverage and real-time processing, and can track moving objects even where satellite positioning signals are weak. "Advanced high-definition radar is becoming a foundational sensing technology across multiple industries," chief executive Kobi Marenko said.

What "4D" means in a radar spec sheet

A conventional imaging radar builds a two-dimensional picture from range and azimuth. A 4D imaging radar, as the technical literature defines it, adds the third spatial coordinate and then velocity from Doppler analysis, using multiple antenna arrays to detect, map and track many static and moving targets at once. The same reference notes the property that matters on a building site: radar does not need a clear optical line of sight, so it keeps working in darkness, smoke, steam, glare and bad weather, where cameras and lidar depend on light that dust and fog scatter.

Arbe describes its product line on its own website as 4D imaging radar technology spanning a chipset, a Phoenix HD radar unit and AI-based processing, aimed at driver assistance and autonomous driving. On its investor relations pages, the company says it was founded in 2015, gives its address as HaHashmonaim Street 107 in Tel Aviv, and claims its imaging radar offers "an order of magnitude higher resolution than any other competing radar solution in the market". The solution is described there as three parts: a radio-frequency chipset with a large channel array, a dedicated radar processor chip, and AI-based post-processing. The company trades under the ticker ARBE.

Why heavy machinery is a separate market from cars

Autonomy in the off-highway world has different physics from autonomy on a motorway. Machines work at low speed in confined spaces where a person can appear a metre from a blade, so the sensing problem is less about seeing 200 metres down a carriageway and more about resolving a nearby object precisely enough to stop. The environment is also filthy by design: quarries and ploughed fields throw up airborne particles continuously rather than occasionally. Arbe's own materials list heavy machinery, all-terrain vehicles and industrial uses alongside automotive applications, which is consistent with a company extending an automotive sensor into adjacent markets.

What the announcement did not say

Arbe did not name a customer, an equipment manufacturer partner or a deployment. It gave no price, no production timetable and no numerical specifications for the resolution or field of view it described as ultra-high and wide. Nor did the statement say whether the off-highway radar is the same hardware as the company's automotive product or a distinct variant, or how it is expected to be priced against lidar for the same machines.