Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a new problem setting for mobile robots based on backscatter-based communication and sensing. Ambient backscatter communication is a technology that transmits/receives data only by switching the impedance of the antenna at high speed without creating a carrier wave on the transmitting side (target backscatter tag). It modulates and transmits data by turning on/off radio waves and reflecting/absorbing radio waves such as Wi-Fi existing in the environment. Data transmission and backscatter tags’ sensing can be done with several tens of \(\mu \)W of power consumption while general Wi-Fi communication requires several tens of mW of power consumption. We have developed a software defined radio (SDR) system for backscatter-based communication and advanced sensing of humans and objects. By equipping each SDR system with multiple antennas and implementing a mechanism to estimate the direction of backscatter communication with high accuracy, and by using multiple SDR systems, our SDR systems can not only transmit/receive data of ambient backscatter communication but also analyze signals obtained from backscatter tags and estimate their positions concurrently with an error of a few centimeters. Computation by a swarm of autonomous mobile robots is one of the most active fields in the distributed computing community. By arranging the multiple SDR systems in a target area, it may be possible to give new environmental conditions to the time-series position estimation of mobile robots. Such environmental conditions can be used for finding a new problem setting for the mobile robots and/or context recognition of humans and objects using mobile robots and backscatter-based communication.
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Acknowledgements
The research in this paper is partly supported by JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant Numbers: 19H05665, 20K20398, 19K11941, 18H03231, and 19H01101). The research is also partly supported by JST PRESTO, Japan (Grant Numbers: JPMJPR1932 and JPMJPR2032).
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Higashino, T., Uchiyama, A., Yamaguchi, H., Saruwatari, S., Watanabe, T., Masuzawa, T. (2021). A New Problem Setting for Mobile Robots Based on Backscatter-Based Communication and Sensing. In: Johnen, C., Schiller, E.M., Schmid, S. (eds) Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems. SSS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13046. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91081-5_10
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