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X-Ray Eyes in the Sky' - Drones and WiFi for 3D Through-Wall Imaging

Researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara have demonstrated high-resolution, 3D through-wall imaging of completely unknown areas - using only WiFi signals and unmanned aerial vehicles. In their approach, two UAVs move autonomously outside of the area of interest, while one transmits a WiFi signal and the other one measures the received signal strength (RSSI) of the corresponding transmission, in order to image the unknown area in 3D. Potential applications include emergency response, archeological discovery, and structural monitoring.

Topics:
Aerospace Automation Defense Imaging Motion Control RF & Microwave Electronics Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music] these days the idea of un man Vehicles such as copter becoming part of our society is not too futuristic Wi-Fi signals are also everywhere and the received signal strength of a wireless transmission can be easily measured in any Wi-Fi equipped device in this paper we're interested in the possibilities created at this

    00:00:28 intersection of Robotics and Communications more specifically we show the first demonstration of 3D highresolution true wall Imaging of completely unknown areas with only Wi-Fi signals which is enabled by using on man areal Vehicles let's first see some experimental results consider this 3D area

    00:00:53 [Music] these two copters are equipped with Wi-Fi transceivers and are interested in imaging this area through walls with only Wi-Fi RSSI measurements they fly outside of the area of Interest while one of them transmits a Wi-Fi signal and the other one measures the corresponding received power no prior measurements have been

    00:01:21 made in this area and so the area is completely unknown to the robots here's the top view of the unknown area of interest and here is a 3D binary ground root image of it the right figure then shows how our two copters image the area with only Wi-Fi as can be seen the copters have successfully image this area in 3D we

    00:01:48 can see that the empty and occupy spaces are imaged well let's now see how we have enabled this there are four key parts to our proposed methodology first consider path planning of the robots using on man Vehicles allows us to have several autonomous transmit receive antenna positions which is key to solving this challenging problem with

    00:02:15 only Wi-Fi RSSI but what path should the robots take we have proposed robot routes that can capture the spatial variations as much as possible while maintaining the efficiency of the operation more specifically our proposed routes are a combination of sloped routes to capture the variations in the Z direction as well as horizontal routes

    00:02:41 to capture the changes in the XY plane next we model the 3D space of Interest as a markof random field to capture the spatial dependencies then by using the hammerle Clifford theorum we can write the conditional probability of x given y y as follows finding a solution that maximizes this probability is an EMP

    00:03:07 hard problem however we then use loopy belief propagation to efficiently find an approximated solution for the modeling of the interaction of the transmitted wave with the area of Interest we use an approximated wave model that results in a linear expression we finally take advantage of the fact that while we're dealing with

    00:03:30 an extremely large number of unknowns the signal of interest is compressible in its information content overall our proposed approach has enabled the first demonstration of high resolution 3D true wall Imaging of completely unknown spaces with only Wi-Fi R SSI measurements see the paper for more details and results