Optimal Beamforming Design for MIMO DFRC Systems with Transmit Covariance Constraint

This paper develops optimal beamforming design in a downlink multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) system to maximize the weighted sum-rate of communicating users under the prescribed transmit covariance constraint for radar performance guarantee. In single-user case, we show that the transmit covariance constraint implies inherent orthogonality among beamforming vectors in use. Then leveraging a corollary of Cauchy's interlace theorem, we derive the globally optimal beamforming solution in closed form. For multi-user case, we exploit the connection between weighted sum-rate and weighted minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) to reformulate the problem, and develop a block-coordinate-descent (BCD) type algorithm with closed-form solution derived for the subproblem in each step and fast convergence to a locally optimal beamforming design. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.

A real-time dynamic obstacle tracking and mapping system for UAV navigation and collision avoidance with an RGB-D camera

The real-time dynamic environment perception has become vital for autonomous robots in crowded spaces. Although the popular voxel-based mapping methods can efficiently represent 3D obstacles with arbitrarily complex shapes, they can hardly distinguish between static and dynamic obstacles, leading to the limited performance of obstacle avoidance. While plenty of sophisticated learning-based dynamic obstacle detection algorithms exist in autonomous driving, the quadcopter's limited computation resources cannot achieve real-time performance using those approaches. To address these issues, we propose a real-time dynamic obstacle tracking and mapping system for quadcopter obstacle avoidance using an RGB-D camera. The proposed system first utilizes a depth image with an occupancy voxel map to generate potential dynamic obstacle regions as proposals. With the obstacle region proposals, the Kalman filter and our continuity filter are applied to track each dynamic obstacle. Finally, the environment-aware trajectory prediction method is proposed based on the Markov chain using the states of tracked dynamic obstacles. We implemented the proposed system with our custom quadcopter and navigation planner. The simulation and physical experiments show that our methods can successfully track and represent obstacles in dynamic environments in real-time and safely avoid obstacles.

Accurate position tracking with a single UWB anchor

Accurate localization and tracking are a fundamental requirement for robotic applications. Localization systems like GPS, optical tracking, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are used for daily life activities, research, and commercial applications. Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology provides another venue to accurately locate devices both indoors and outdoors. In this paper, we study a localization solution with a single UWB anchor, instead of the traditional multi-anchor setup. Besides the challenge of a single UWB ranging source, the only other sensor we require is a low-cost 9 DoF inertial measurement unit (IMU). Under such a configuration, we propose continuous monitoring of UWB range changes to estimate the robot speed when moving on a line. Combining speed estimation with orientation estimation from the IMU sensor, the system becomes temporally observable. We use an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate the pose of a robot. With our solution, we can effectively correct the accumulated error and maintain accurate tracking of a moving robot.