Scientists work on ‘supernatural’ vision system for robots

If you want to find out if your robot can see through smoke, okay, you need some smoke.

But a student from the University of Pennsylvania suffered a setback when he began using late night to test such a robot.

Shortly after flicking the switch on the smoke machine, a vigorous fire alarm closed.

“The entire building is triggered,” says Mingamin Jhao of the University of Pennsylvania. “My student called me. He was very surprised.”

The incident was a minor blow for the team that was developing robots equipped with an innovative radio-based sensing system.

Radio waves may allow robots or autonomous vehicles to be seen through coarse smoke, acute rain – or even corners. Such waves can also detect hidden weapons.

But simulating visual imagination based on radio waves is an unusual approach to robots and autonomous vehicles. Those areas have very more installed regular optical cameras, light detections and lidar, and other sensors.

However, Pro Jhao and their students have developed a potentially powerful method for robots to use radio waves.

Of course radar, which uses radio waves, has been used to track aircraft, ships and weather for decades.

But on the spinning array Pro Jhao Robot Radio throws waves in all directions.

An on-board Artificial Intelligence (AI) system then creates a 3D view of the environment with this information.

“What we are trying to do here basically helps the robot to get supernatural vision – to look into the scenarios where human eyes or traditional visual sensors cannot,” pro say.

They suggest that technology can help protect future discovery and rescue robots from a burning building.

After the testing of the bot used a clear plastic box filled with smoke around its spinning devices, so that any surrounding fire alarm avoids triggering the alarm.

Although humans cannot see them, radio waves are a form of light in the sense that they are part of electromagnetic spectrum, including X-rays and gamma rays. Only a small part spectrum is classified as visible light.

Being light, radio waves can reflect surfaces and materials, although slightly for visible light. Prof. Jhao and his colleagues have designed their robots so that it can understand them Radio wave reflection,

The important factor here is that radio waves are longer than visible light waves, meaning that they are not blocked by small smoke particles.

Prof. Jhao says that he is also working on adopting technology so that the robot can see a part of a corner to go round. Think of it like a mirror hall, he suggests, for radio waves instead of just visible lights.

“This is really very interesting and quite impressive,” says Friedman Renhard at Rostock University, Germany, who were not involved in the work. In 2017, Pro Renehard and colleagues explained how Wi-Fi signal can allow detectives To see in private rooms,

A slight limit is that the spinning array, according to the definition, see in all directions at a time. Prof. Renhard says that a lot of data processing by the system seems necessary to clean the image from this spinning device.

However, the robot sends radio waves to millimeter wave bands (waves that are between one and ten millimeters long). This is the same technique that is used for some 5G installation.

“It is potentially very attractive, it is a very well -understood, inexpensive technique,” says Pro Rainhard. “I would definitely like to watch a self-driving car driving on the radar only.”

But Fabio da Silva, founder and chief executive officer of US firm Wavesense, says, it is possible to avoid using spinning radio-entertaining devices to use fungi-amiting devices, which is also developing radio-based sensing technology. .

“We have created an algorithm that allows you to feel the entire space immediately and continuously, so we do not need to spin our antennas,” they say.

He describes the system as ecolocation, which is used by bats. It sends radio waves and “hears” how the waves come back, which reveals the size of whatever they have killed.

Some researchers have used radio waves Find out hidden weapons Such as hidden handgun and knife.

Radio waves can also “fingerprint” a room details. Then, if the scan is later scanned later, it shows whether any object in the room has been transferred.

Last year, Scientist Proposed that countries use this method to investigate the management of other countries of its nuclear weapons stockpiles. For example, it would be a way to know if someone was carrying the warhead around.

Separately, Luana Olivieri at the University of Lafboro has discovered using a different form of non-visible electromagnetic radiation, Terartz Waves. These are less than radio waves but are longer than visible light waves. “This wavelength is particularly unexplained,” Dr. Olivieri says.

She says that it is possible to see through objects and analyze the material. Such a system, in theory, can identify specific drugs by detecting its chemical composition.

But viewing through the material can help the rescue bot find a trapped person in some future disaster, it also has other applications. Police forces and terrorists have access Radio-based technology This allows them to see them to some extent through doors and walls.

“Warfighting is certainly a market that it completes. It can be used to find and kill someone,” is called Sri Dr. Silva. He has said that he has demonstrated the technology of Wavesense for the US Department of Defense Department and the Israeli Ministry.

And yet these applications are not completely surprising, Pro Renhard suggests that a range of emerging technologies have made it easier to detect and attack people in principle.

“Maybe the radar sounds scary – but drones and cheap cameras are very dangerous,” they say.