Localization and tracking of electronic devices with their unintended emissions

The precise localization and tracking of electronic devices via their unintended emissions has a broad range of commercial and security applications. Active stimulation of the receivers of such devices with a known signal generates very low power unintended emissions. This dissertation presents localization and tracking of multiple devices using both simulation and experimental data in the form of five papers. First the localization of multiple emitting devices through active stimulation under multipath fading with a Smooth MUSIC based scheme in the near field region is presented. Spatial smoothing helps to separate the correlated sources and the multipath fading and results confirm improved accuracy. A cost effective near-field localization method is proposed next to locate multiple correlated unintended emitting devices under colored noise conditions using two well separated antenna arrays since colored noise in the environment degrades the subspace-based localization techniques. Subsequently, in order to track moving sources, a near-field scheme by using array output is introduced to monitor direction of arrival (DOA) and the distance between the antenna array and the moving source. The array output, which is a nonlinear function of DOA and distance information, is employed in the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). In order to show the near- and far-field effect on estimation accuracy, computer simulation results are included for localization and tracking techniques. Finally, an L-shaped array is constructed and a suite of schemes are introduced for localization and tracking of such devices in the three-dimensional environment. Experimental results for localization and tracking of unintended emissions from single and multiple devices in the near-field environment of an antenna array are demonstrated --Abstract, page iv

An effective localization method for mixed far-field and near-field strictly non-circular sources

In this paper, an effective direction-of-arrival (DOA) and range estimations method for mixed far-field and near-field non-circular sources is proposed based on a large centrosymmetric uniform linear array (ULA). By exploiting the non-circularity of the sources, an extended signal is generated by concatenating the received array data and its conjugate counterparts. Then the DOAs of far-field signals are estimated based on the extended covariance matrix with the traditional MUSIC algorithm. After eliminating the far-field components from the extended signal subspace, the extended covariance matrix of the near-field signals is obtained. Thus a near-field estimator is constructed based on symmetric property of the extended array manifold where the generalized ESPRIT method is adopted to estimate the DOAs of near-field sources. Finally, the range estimator is derived using the DOA estimations of near-field sources. Simulation results are provided to validate that the proposed method has achieved a better performance than existing ones and is quite suitable for massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-out) system

Distributed Control of Microscopic Robots in Biomedical Applications

Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to bacteria, could simultaneously monitor entire populations of cells individually in vivo. This paper reviews plausible capabilities for microscopic robots and the physical constraints due to operation in fluids at low Reynolds number, diffusion-limited sensing and thermal noise from Brownian motion. Simple distributed controls are then presented in the context of prototypical biomedical tasks, which require control decisions on millisecond time scales. The resulting behaviors illustrate trade-offs among speed, accuracy and resource use. A specific example is monitoring for patterns of chemicals in a flowing fluid released at chemically distinctive sites. Information collected from a large number of such devices allows estimating properties of cell-sized chemical sources in a macroscopic volume. The microscopic devices moving with the fluid flow in small blood vessels can detect chemicals released by tissues in response to localized injury or infection. We find the devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing high-resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a source would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the blood volume as obtained with a blood sample

Optical techniques for 3D surface reconstruction in computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery

One of the main challenges for computer-assisted surgery (CAS) is to determine the intra-opera- tive morphology and motion of soft-tissues. This information is prerequisite to the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon’s navigation capabilites by observ- ing beyond exposed tissue surfaces and for providing intelligent control of robotic-assisted in- struments. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), optical techniques are an increasingly attractive approach for in vivo 3D reconstruction of the soft-tissue surface geometry. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art methods for optical intra-operative 3D reconstruction in laparoscopic surgery and discusses the technical challenges and future perspectives towards clinical translation. With the recent paradigm shift of surgical practice towards MIS and new developments in 3D opti- cal imaging, this is a timely discussion about technologies that could facilitate complex CAS procedures in dynamic and deformable anatomical regions

Localization of Spatially Distributed Near-Field Sources with Unknown Angular Spread Shape

International audienceIn this paper, we propose to localize and characterize coherently distributed (CD) sources in near-field. Indeed, it appears that in some applications, the more the sources are close to the array of sensors, the more they can seem scattered. It thus appears of the biggest importance to take into account the angular distribution of the sources in the joint direction of arrival (DOA) and range estimation methods. The methods of the literature which consider the problem of distributed sources do not handle with the case of near field sources and require that the shape of the dispersion is known. The main contribution of the proposed method is to estimate the shape of the angular distribution using an additional shape parameter to address the case of unknown distributions. We propose to jointly estimate the DOA, the range, the spread angle and the shape of the spread distribution. Accurate estimation is then achieved even when the shape of the angular spread distribution is unknown or imperfectly known. Moreover, the proposed estimator improves angular resolution of the sources

A Geometric Approach to Sound Source Localization from Time-Delay Estimates

This paper addresses the problem of sound-source localization from time-delay estimates using arbitrarily-shaped non-coplanar microphone arrays. A novel geometric formulation is proposed, together with a thorough algebraic analysis and a global optimization solver. The proposed model is thoroughly described and evaluated. The geometric analysis, stemming from the direct acoustic propagation model, leads to necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of time delays to correspond to a unique position in the source space. Such sets of time delays are referred to as feasible sets. We formally prove that every feasible set corresponds to exactly one position in the source space, whose value can be recovered using a closed-form localization mapping. Therefore we seek for the optimal feasible set of time delays given, as input, the received microphone signals. This time delay estimation problem is naturally cast into a programming task, constrained by the feasibility conditions derived from the geometric analysis. A global branch-and-bound optimization technique is proposed to solve the problem at hand, hence estimating the best set of feasible time delays and, subsequently, localizing the sound source. Extensive experiments with both simulated and real data are reported; we compare our methodology to four state-of-the-art techniques. This comparison clearly shows that the proposed method combined with the branch-and-bound algorithm outperforms existing methods. These in-depth geometric understanding, practical algorithms, and encouraging results, open several opportunities for future work.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 3 table, journa

A statistical approach to the inverse problem in magnetoencephalography

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is an imaging technique used to measure the magnetic field outside the human head produced by the electrical activity inside the brain. The MEG inverse problem, identifying the location of the electrical sources from the magnetic signal measurements, is ill-posed, that is, there are an infinite number of mathematically correct solutions. Common source localization methods assume the source does not vary with time and do not provide estimates of the variability of the fitted model. Here, we reformulate the MEG inverse problem by considering time-varying locations for the sources and their electrical moments and we model their time evolution using a state space model. Based on our predictive model, we investigate the inverse problem by finding the posterior source distribution given the multiple channels of observations at each time rather than fitting fixed source parameters. Our new model is more realistic than common models and allows us to estimate the variation of the strength, orientation and position. We propose two new Monte Carlo methods based on sequential importance sampling. Unlike the usual MCMC sampling scheme, our new methods work in this situation without needing to tune a high-dimensional transition kernel which has a very high cost. The dimensionality of the unknown parameters is extremely large and the size of the data is even larger. We use Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) to speed up the computation.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS716 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Ono: an open platform for social robotics

In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform