mmCaliper: High resolution sensing of distances using mmWave Radars
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Mishra, Ankush
- Graduate Program:
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 31, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Mahanth Gowda, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Abutalib Aghayev, Committee Member
Chitaranjan Das, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- wireless sensing
radars
high-resolution
waves
chirps - Abstract:
- Millimeter-wave (mmWave) is a key technology in 5G networks enabling much higher transfer rates compared to lower frequency bands. This technology also paves way for new sensing modalities for various applications such as indoor people tracking, wireless heart-rate and breathing monitoring, and industrial vibration sensing. Wireless sensing and distance measurement is an oft-explored application that has been explored quite extensively in the past not just from mmWave Radars but other modalities such as LiDAR, infrared (IR), soundly based, and more recently computer vision-based methods. But these devices can be affected by environmental factors such as atmospheric conditions and the reflectivity of the objects being measured. These methods also cannot be applied to non-line-of-sight (NLOS) sensing scenarios. Such challenges do not affect radars and thus make them more versatile for usage scenarios. In this thesis, we explore the question of whether the advantages of mmWave radars can be used to improve the range resolution for finer granularity. This work presents the feasibility and investigations towards the accurate measurement of linear and two-dimensional distances using mmWave Radar. We show how mmWave radars with a larger chirp diversity can be used to determine sub-centimeter level distance measurements using a maximum voting-based mechanism. Further experiments on how this compares to other methods and how we can apply our setup for other applications are shown. This can be of use in ADAS-based systems, and also in accurate measurements for household devices such as robot vacuums.