Automatic Mapping of the Indoor World with Personal Radars

TL;DR

This paper explores the development of personal radar technology at millimeter-waves for automatic indoor mapping, aiming to enable fast, reliable, and widespread indoor environment perception without traditional robot-based SLAM methods.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of personal radars at millimeter-waves for indoor mapping and discusses experimental results and future research directions.

Findings

Successful collection of experimental data with personal radars.

Demonstrated potential for indoor mapping in low-visibility conditions.

Identified future research paths for device development and mapping algorithms.

Abstract

Digital maps will revolutionize our experience of perceiving and navigating indoor environments. While today we rely only on the representation of the outdoors, the mapping of indoors is mainly a part of the traditional SLAM problem where robots discover the surrounding and perform self-localization. Nonetheless, robot deployment prevents from a large diffusion and fast mapping of indoors and, further, they are usually equipped with laser and vision technology that fail in scarce visibility conditions. To this end, a possible solution is to turn future personal devices into personal radars as a milestone towards the automatic generation of indoor maps using massive array technology at millimeter-waves, already in place for communications. In this application-oriented paper, we will describe the main achievements attained so far to develop the personal radar concept, using ad-hoc collected experimental data, and by discussing possible future directions of investigation.