Autonomous wireless radar sensor mote integrating a doppler radar into a sensor mote and its application in surveillance and target material classification

Abstract

An autonomous wireless sensor network that consists of different types of sensor modalities is a topic of intense research due to its versatility and portability of applications. Typical autonomous sensor networks commonly include passive sensor nodes such as infrared, acoustic, seismic, and magnetic. However, fusion of another active sensor such as Doppler radar in the integrated sensor network may offer powerful capabilities for many different sensing and classification tasks. In this work, we demonstrate the design and implementation of an autonomous wireless sensor network integrating a Doppler sensor into wireless sensor node with commercial off the shelf components. Then we demonstrate two applications of the newly integrated radar mote in a wireless sensor network environment where other sensor motes are supporting the integrated radar mote for autonomous triggering and data collection. At first we use the integrated system to detect the range and velocity of a toy train effectively to demonstrate its capability as a surveillance tool. Then we classify different types of non-conducting target materials based on their reflected signal response to newly built radar mote. Different types of materials can usually affect the amount of energy reflected back to the source of an electromagnetic wave. For investigating this observation we simulate models for the reflectivity of different homogeneous non-conducting materials using a mathematical model and later classify the types of target materials using real experimental data collected through our autonomous radar-mote sensor network. © 2011 SPIE.

Publication Title

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

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