In an effort to help robots see in tricky situations, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are reaching for a fourth option: radio. Radio waves readily travel through smoke and glass, making them impervious to conditions that wouldn’t be safe for human eyes and to the shiny surfaces that make up many retail and office buildings. PanoRadar, the researchers’ experimental system, tests the viability of using this technology in place of more conventional techniques.
In an effort to help robots see in tricky situations, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are reaching for a fourth option: radio. Radio waves readily travel through smoke and glass, making them impervious to conditions that wouldn’t be safe for human eyes and to the shiny surfaces that make up many retail and office buildings. PanoRadar, the researchers’ experimental system, tests the viability of using this technology in place of more conventional techniques.
Based on how long it takes for all these radio waves to bounce back—AKA how close or far away an object is—PanoRadar builds a heat map. Then, to create an image useful to humans, PanoRadar feeds that heat map into a machine learning algorithm, which constructs a 3D image of the system’s surroundings. The result is a high-resolution, panoramic view of an environment that would otherwise be difficult for human eyes, LIDAR, or radar to parse.
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