Fill level measurements using an M-sequence UWB radar. - In: International journal of microwave and wireless technologies, ISSN 1759-0795, Bd. 15 (2023), 1, S. 74-81
Due to increasingly complex and automated manufacturing processes, the demands on the control parameters of these processes are also increasing. In many applications, such a parameter is the fill quantity, whose precise determination is of ever growing importance. This paper shows with which accuracy and precision an M-sequence ultra-wideband radar can determine levels in small metallic and non-metallic containers with contact-based and contactless measurements. First, the principle of level measurement using guided wave radar is explained and the measurement setup is described. Afterward, the measurement results are shown and discussed. The measurements show that the level can be measured with an accuracy of better than 0.5 mm. In addition, level fluctuations can be detected with a precision of 3 μm. Based on the results of the guided wave radar, the possibilities of volumetric contactless measurement using an electrically small patch antenna are discussed. A particular challenge in contactless level measurement is the high number of multipath components, which strongly influence the accuracy. In addition, there are near-field effects when measuring close to the antenna. Exploiting these near-field effects, an additional method to accurately determine the full state of the container is investigated.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1759078722000502
Labeling custom indoor point clouds through 2D semantic image segmentation. - In: IEEE Xplore digital library, ISSN 2473-2001, (2022), S. 261-264
For effective Computer Vision (CV) applications, one of the difficult challenges service robots have to face concerns with complete scene understanding. Therefore, various strategies are employed for point-level segregation of the 3D scene, such as semantic segmentation. Currently Deep Learning (DL) based algorithms are popular in this domain. However, they require precisely labeled ground truth data. Generating this data is a lengthy and expensive procedure, resulting in a limited variety of available data. On the contrary, the 2D image domain offers labeled data in abundance. Therefore, this study explores how we can achieve accurate labels for the 3D domain by utilizing semantic segmentation on 2D images and projecting the estimated labels to the 3D space via the depth channel. The labeled data may then be used for vision related tasks such as robot navigation or localization.
https://doi.org/10.1109/IRC55401.2022.00050
Emulation of electromagnetic plane waves for 3D antenna pattern estimation. - In: IEEE Xplore digital library, ISSN 2473-2001, (2022), insges. 6 S.
With the fast development of wireless devices, over-the-air (OTA) testing is becoming the preferred method among developers and manufacturers of wireless equipment. The ability to recreate a scenario under controllable and repeatable conditions keeps the method under constant development, providing new features that increase the realism during the tests. A recent proof of that is the integration of 3D wave field synthesis (3DWFS) to OTA testing, which becomes a significant step to accurately emulate wireless scenarios within a controlled environment.In this context, this contribution improves the OTA system calibration for 3DWFS; efficiently increasing the emulation quality of electromagnetic plane waves impinging from any angular position within an anechoic chamber. In fact, this enhancement implicitly delivers a new method for accurate estimation of the antenna radiation pattern in 3D. This is not only a highly demanded application among antenna manufacturers but in this case also proves the validity of the results and consolidates the integration of 3DWFS to OTA testing.
https://doi.org/10.1109/VTC2022-Fall57202.2022.10013008
Enhancement of vision-based 3D reconstruction systems using radar for smart farming. - In: IEEE Xplore digital library, ISSN 2473-2001, (2022), S. 155-159
Digital field recordings are central to most precision agriculture systems since they can replicate the physical environment and thus monitor the state of an entire field or individual plants. Using different sensors, such as cameras and radar, data can be collected from various domains. Through the combination of radio wave propagation and visible light phenomena, it is possible to enhance, e.g., the optical condition of a fruit with internal parameters such as the water content. This paper proposes a method to correct sensor errors to perform data fusion. As an example, we observe a watermelon with camera and radar sensors and present a system architecture for the visualization of both sensors. For this purpose, we constructed a handheld platform on which both sensors are mounted. In our report, the radar is analyzed in terms of systematic and stochastic errors to formulate an angle-dependent mapping function for error correction. It is successfully shown that camera and radar data are correctly assigned with a watermelon used as a target object, demonstrated by a 3D reconstruction. The proposed system shows promising results for sensor overlay, but radar data remain challenging to interpret.
https://doi.org/10.1109/MetroAgriFor55389.2022.9964699
Time-domain analysis of ultra-wideband scattering properties of fruits. - In: 2022 19th European Radar Conference, (2022), S. 77-80
In the present paper we evaluate scattering properties of fruits measured with a short-range Ultra-Wideband radar. This is part of our investigation how effectively such a radar can be used to infer information such as fruit biomass or ripeness in an agricultural environment. The covered frequency band spans from 1.4 to 5.6 GHz. We analyze measured impulse responses of a watermelon, a grapefruit, and an apple with respect to a dependency on the distance between radar and fruit and the observation angle i.e., rotation of the fruit. Measurements are performed under laboratory conditions, however, we analyze the data considering a pre-harvest analysis on a field. It becomes apparent that an analysis of the dispersed dominant reflection of the peel is most promising. Due to the natural growth and hence anisotropy of the fruits, we conclude to average over multiple monostatic observation angles to reduce the natural variations of e.g. the scattered power.
https://doi.org/10.23919/EuRAD54643.2022.9924720
Enable SDRs for real-time MIMO channel sounding featuring parallel coherent Rx channels. - In: 2022 IEEE 95th Vehicular Technology Conference:(VTC2022-Spring), (2022), insges. 5 S.
A parallel receiver architecture for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel sounding application is presented with a software-defined radio (SDR)-based field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation. The receiver covers phase coherent reception via shared local oscillator (LO) and reference clock, a timing scheme synchronous to the antenna switching at the transmitter, and an integrated automatic gain control (AGC) in all receive channels. It is built with SDRs (NI USRP-2955, X310 series with TwinRx daughterboards). The use of these off-the-shelf hardware components reduces the costs of the sounding system. The FPGA implementation together with the system parameters of the chosen hardware allows a minimum AGC update interval of approx. 44.38 μs. Our setup demonstrates the applicability of state-of-the-art SDRs as a sounding system for continuous acquisition of the time variant, space, and frequency selective radio propagation channel.
https://doi.org/10.1109/VTC2022-Spring54318.2022.9860841
From 3D point cloud data to ray-tracing multi-band simulations in industrial scenario. - In: 2022 IEEE 95th Vehicular Technology Conference:(VTC2022-Spring), (2022), insges. 5 S.
In this paper, we present the ray tracing (RT) simulation in the 3D model of one highly dense clutter industrial hall, which is scanned by laser scanner and reconstructed based on accurate point cloud. The whole processing chain from the scanning of the physical environment to running the simulation is presented in detail. To validate the simulation results, the synthetic channel characteristics and large-scale parameters, including delay spread (DS), angular spread (AS) and path loss (PL), are compared with those obtained from channel sounding measurement in both LOS and NLOS cases, at 6.75 GHz, 30 GHz and 60 GHz. The simulation results show that some scatters are significant in all bands and may be well identified and tracked. This indicates that our target to generate a deterministic channel model or a hybrid channel model at multi-band for industrial scenario may be possible.
https://doi.org/10.1109/VTC2022-Spring54318.2022.9861002
5G new radio physical downlink control channel reliability enhancements for multiple transmission-reception-point communications. - In: IEEE access, ISSN 2169-3536, Bd. 10 (2022), S. 97394-97407
Non-coherent transmission from multiple transmission-reception-points (TRPs), i.e., base stations, or base station panels to a user equipment (UE) is exploited in 5G New Radio (NR) to improve downlink reliability and cell-edge throughput. Ultra reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) are prominent target use-cases for multi-TRP or multi-panel transmissions. In Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 17 specifications, multi-TRP-based transmissions were specified for the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) specifically to enhance its reliability and robustness. In this work, a comprehensive account of various multi-TRP reliability enhancement schemes applicable for the 5G NR PDCCH, including the ones supported by the 3GPP Release 17 specifications, is provided. The impact of the specifications for each scheme, UE and network complexity and their utility in various use-cases is studied. Their error performances are evaluated via link-level simulations using the evaluation criteria agreed in the 3GPP proceedings. The 3GPP-supported multi-TRP PDCCH repetition schemes, and the additionally proposed PDCCH repetition and diversity schemes are shown to be effective in improving 5G NR PDCCH reliability and combating link blockage in mmWave scenarios. The link-level simulations also provide insights for the implementation of the decoding schemes for the PDCCH enhancements under different channel conditions. Analysis of the performance, complexity and implementation constraints of the proposed PDCCH transmission schemes indicate their suitability to UEs with reduced-capability or stricter memory constraints and flexible network scheduling.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3206027
Phase estimation of single tones next to modulated signals in the medium frequency R-mode system. - In: IEEE access, ISSN 2169-3536, Bd. 10 (2022), S. 73309-73316
Position, navigation, and timing information are critical to today’s infrastructures; as a result, the possibility of estimating ranges is being explored in more and more radio systems. One way to achieve this is to extend the modulation with time-synchronised aiding carriers and to estimate their phase at the receiver side. In this paper, we present two ways to minimise the negative influence of the modulation on the phase estimation. We show that the classical maximum likelihood estimator is still an efficient estimator for our problem, using a medium-frequency R-Mode signal as an example, and is therefore used in receiver designs. We then describe two possible ways to precondition the signal to increase the accuracy for short observations. As a first approach, we describe how window functions can positively change the signal-to-noise ratio for our estimation. As a second approach, we show the use of a narrowband bandpass filter. Finally, we show that these approaches, applied to real measurements, improve the variance of the estimate by up to two orders of magnitude.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3190544
Descending staircase detection for service robots based on M-sequence UWB radar. - In: 2021 18th European Radar Conference, (2022), S. 29-32
Service robotics is expected to be one of the central growth industries of this century. The technological key to this lies in the sufficient perception of the environment, even under difficult conditions, because mobile robots have to orientate themselves and navigate without collision under all circumstances. However, the safe detection of especially descending stairs is a big challenge so far. In this paper, the results of descending staircase detection using UWB radar are shown. The individual steps of the signal processing from signal preparation to multi-target tracking are briefly explained and an outlook is given on how to classify a staircase based on the results. For all investigated stairs the edge of the first step could be detected reliably from a distance of 1.5 m and multiple steps are distinguishable as well.
https://doi.org/10.23919/EuRAD50154.2022.9784493