See through smoke: Robust indoor mapping with low-cost mmWave radar

Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Stefano Rosa, Peijun Zhao, Bing Wang, Changhao Chen, John A. Stankovic, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

131 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of milliMap, a single-chip millimetre wave (mmWave) radar based indoor mapping system targetted towards low-visibility environments to assist in emergency response. A unique feature of milliMap is that it only leverages a low-cost, off-the-shelf mmWave radar, but can reconstruct a dense grid map with accuracy comparable to lidar, as well as providing semantic annotations of objects on the map. milliMap makes two key technical contributions. First, it autonomously overcomes the sparsity and multi-path noise of mmWave signals by combining cross-modal supervision from a co-located lidar during training and the strong geometric priors of indoor spaces. Second, it takes the spectral response of mmWave reflections as features to robustly identify different types of objects e.g. doors, walls etc. Extensive experiments in different indoor environments show that milliMap can achieve a map reconstruction error less than 0.2m and classify key semantics with an accuracy of ∼ 90%, whilst operating through dense smoke.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMobiSys 2020 - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages14-27
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450379540
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jun 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event18th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2020 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 15 Jun 202019 Jun 2020

Publication series

NameMobiSys 2020 - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Conference

Conference18th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2020
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period15/06/2019/06/20

Keywords

  • Emergency response
  • Indoor mapping
  • Millimeter wave radar
  • Mobile robotics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications

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