Events Calendar

AI Seminar

Speaker: Edwin Kan, Cornell University

Talk Title: Indoor Radio Detection and Ranging: A Phase-Based Continuous Wave Approach

Abstract: Among all of the advances in electronic and information technology, radio frequency technology for indoor precision real time locating system still remains inaccessible for most applications, including 3D human machine interface , biomedical monitoring, prosthetic feedback control and indoor navigation. In addition, Internet of Things will be heavily constrained if the physical location of the thing remains unknown or inaccurately known. Many local area network and body area network breakthroughs can be enabled if an indoor radar like technology can be broadly deployed. The detection and ranging principle of indoor RTLS is similar to outdoor radar, but has many unresolved challenges such as unspecific reflection, path obstruction, and multi path interference.
The continuous wave phase based ranging method for high short range precision is simple and flexible, but vulnerable to phase offsets and interferences. I will present passive broadband harmonic nonlinear transmission line tags to fundamentally rectify previous CW problems. Because phase information is now contained within the second harmonic rather than the fundamental frequency, interferences and phase errors caused by direct reflections of the interrogating signal are greatly reduced. The tag is now the only radiation source in SH within the indoor ambient, which enables many radar techniques like channel coherence, beamforming and synthetic aperture to improve precision, evaluate measurement quality and reduce spectral cost. Multiple but sparse frequencies are employed to resolve the integer ambiguity and to achieve millimeter level precision under phase error tolerance towards total of 180o. Human movement causes distinctive magnitude and phase channel fading, and can be equalized for better tag reading. Furthermore, digital or dumb antenna beamforming can be used for multi path evaluation, while tag movement for synthetic aperture. With the help of known harmonic landmark tags, the tagless objects within the reading range can be further mapped out with redundant angular and frequency diversity, which enables many additional applications. I will show realistic indoor experiments to validate our models and algorithms.

Biography: Edwin C. Kan received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1988 and 1992, respectively, all in electrical engineering. In January 1992, he joined Dawn Technologies as a Principal CAD Engineer developing advanced electronic and optical device simulators and technology CAD framework. He was then with Stanford University, as a Research Associate from 1994 to 1997. From 1997, he was an Assistant Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where he is now a Professor. He has spent the summers of 2000 and 2001 at IBM Microelectronics, Yorktown Heights and Fishkill, NY, in the Faculty Partner Program. In 2004 and 2005, he has been a visiting researcher at Intel Research, Santa Clara, CA, and a visiting professor at Stanford University during his sabbatical leave. His main research areas include CMOS technologies, semiconductor device physics, flash memory, CMOS biosensors, ultra low power radio link, and numerical methods for PDE and ODE. Dr. Kan received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineer in October 2000 from the White House. He also received several teaching awards from Cornell Engineering College for his CMOS and MEMS courses.

Host: Weimin Shen

Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=b4ce1413f2664d01b4e8d26daa2b99e01d

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Floor conference room

WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=b4ce1413f2664d01b4e8d26daa2b99e01d

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kary LAU