Vibrational Radar Backscatter Communications
Unmet Need
The advent of autonomous driving powered by computational detection and assessment of vehicle surroundings by things like vision and radar has shown a lot of promise for self-driving vehicles. However, these systems can struggle to fully identify the critical components of an environment to make informed decisions about factors such as pedestrian activity or unexpected traffic blockages. There is a need for communication systems that can integrate into pre-existing developments of autonomous driving to enable identification of critical surrounding factors without latency due to quantity of input.
Technology
Duke inventors have developed a method for encoding information into vibration signatures to provide sophisticated wireless communication at radar frequencies. This is intended to be a key component in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) systems to provide radar equipped vehicles and technologies with the ability to sense and identify environmental objects such as people, bicycles, and nearby structures. Specifically, this technology is enabled by illuminating a vibrating surface with millimeter-wave radar to induce a time-varying phase in the radar backscatter that corresponds directly to the detected vibration. This approach provides a robust method for encoding and transmitting information from the location of multiple vibrational devices to the origin of the radar signal without latency or interference. Thus, by incorporating this technology for vibrational radar backscatter communications (VRBC) into devices like radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, a wireless network with a large population of sensors and tags can be established without additional infrastructure beyond a transmit/receive radar antenna. This has been demonstrated by proof-of-concept device experimentation with preliminary results in applying VRBC to V2X environments, as well as establishing correlation between radar system capabilities and expected VRBC performance.
Other Applications
This technology could also provide methods for wireless interconnectivity to any system with radar capabilities, or systems capable of incorporating radar. Examples of such systems exist in applications specific to Internet of Things (IoT) or wireless sensing.
Advantages
- Minimal bandwidth consumption
- Minimal power consumption
- Directly integrable with existing radar systems
- Able to detect and differentiate devices at a high spatial resolution
- No latency as network device population increases