Communication As A Sensor

Leveraging mobility in 3D space and received wireless signals to emulate a ‘virtual antenna array’

We develop the analytical framework for a novel Wireless signal-based Sensing capability for Robotics (WSR) by leveraging robots’ mobility. It allows robots to primarily measure relative direction, or Angle-of-Arrival (AOA), to
other robots, while operating in non-line-of-sight unmapped environments and without requiring external infrastructure.
We do so by capturing all of the paths that a wireless signal traverses as it travels from a transmitting to a receiving robot in the team, which we term as an AOA profile. The key intuition behind our approach is to enable a robot to emulate antenna arrays as it moves freely in 2D and 3D space. The small differences in the phase of the wireless signals are thus processed with knowledge of robots’ local displacement to obtain the profile, via a method akin to Synthetic Aperture
Radar (SAR).

I. A Wireless Signal-based Sensing Framework for Robotics

We derive a new capability for robots to measure relative direction, or Angle-of-Arrival (AOA), to other robots operating in non-line-of-sight and unmapped environments with occlusions, without requiring external infrastructure. We do so by capturing all of the paths that a WiFi signal traverses as it travels from a transmitting to a receiving robot, which we term an AOA profile. The key intuition is to “emulate antenna arrays in the air” as the robots move in 3D space, a method akin to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). The main contributions include development of i) a framework to accommodate arbitrary 3D trajectories, as well as continuous mobility all robots, while computing AOA profiles and ii) an accompanying analysis that provides a lower bound on variance of AOA estimation as a function of robot trajectory geometry based on the Cramer Rao Bound. This is a critical distinction with previous work on SAR that restricts robot mobility to prescribed motion patterns, does not generalize to 3D space, and/or requires transmitting robots to be static during data acquisition periods. Our method results in more accurate AOA profiles and thus better AOA estimation, and formally characterizes this observation as the informativeness of the trajectory; a computable quantity for which we derive a closed form. All theoretical developments are substantiated by extensive simulation and hardware experiments. We also show that our formulation can be used with an off-the-shelf trajectory estimation sensor.  We opensource our framework as part of the WSR Toolbox 

II. Active Rendezvous for Multi-robot Pose Graph Optimization using Sensing over Wi-Fi

We present a novel framework for collaboration amongst a team of robots performing Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) that addresses two important challenges for multi-robot SLAM: i) that of enabling information exchange “on-demand” via Active Rendezvous without using a map or the robot’s location, and ii) that of rejecting outlying measurements. Our key insight is to exploit relative position data present in the communication channel between robots to improve ground truth accuracy of PGO. We develop an algorithmic and experimental framework for integrating Channel State Information (CSI) with multi-robot PGO; it is distributed, and applicable in low-lighting or featureless environments where traditional sensors often fail. We present extensive experimental results on actual robots and observe that using Active Rendezvous results in a 64% reduction in ground truth pose error and that using CSI observations to aid outlier rejection reduces ground truth pose error by 32%. These results show the potential of integrating communication as a novel sensor for SLAM.

Communication As A Sensor Publications

Ninad Jadhav, Weiying Wang, Diana Zhang, Swarun Kumar, and Stephanie Gil. 2022. “Toolbox Release: A WiFi-Based Relative Bearing Framework for Robotics.” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022.

Ninad Jadhav, Weiying Wang, Diana Zhang, Oussama Khatib, Swarun Kumar, and Stephanie Gil. 9/26/2022. “A wireless signal-based sensing framework for robotics.” International Journal of Robotics Research, 2022, Volume 41, Issue 11-12, Pp. 955–992.

Weiying Wang, Ninad Jadhav, Paul Vohs, Nathan Hughes, Mark Mazumder, and Stephanie Gil. 12/29/2019. “Active Rendezvous for Multi-Robot Pose Graph Optimization using Sensing over Wi-Fi.” In International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR). Hanoi: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics.