Meant to be Seen

http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-smallest-s ... tem/25152/

This sounds very interesting.

low-cost, fingernail-sized radar chip package that could be implemented in a variety of areas, including the automotive industry, robotics and smartphones.

The chip package measures 8 x 8 mm (0.3 x 0.3 inches), operates at 120 GHz, and can calculate the distance of an object up to around 3 meters (10 feet) away, to an accuracy of within 1 mm. It can also detect moving objects, and their velocity, by using the Doppler effect.

The winning combination of tiny size and inexpensive manufacturing process, which should allow the chip to be produced for roughly €1 (US$1.29) per unit, opens up possibilities for its implementation in several areas, such as automatic door system controls, cars, robotics, and even smartphones.

Edit:

A link to the project's website: http://www.success-project.eu/

That is interesting. It could possibly be combined to correct a dead reckoning system. So for example, in a large warehouse you could run around the central area and calculate an approximate location with dead reckoning - which would then be confirmed as you got within 3 meters of the walls, or another player, or a prop.

Alternatively, you could use low ceilings and hang distinct marker objects and possibly be able to determine position with those.

Those are good ideas.

It could be nice if used in a small room too, like a camera would be used to view the outside world. You could have a Matrix-style or wireframe model of physical objects overlayed on the virtual world when you call them up. You could see the outline of a keyboard, or if someone threw a ball at your face it would be detected and appear in red.

This seems to be aimed more at speed & range sensing than 3D RADAR scanning: a more accurate and precise replacement for the old ultrasonic transducer/receiver pair setup. I can't find any mention of any sort of directional sensing on their website or linked articles though, their papers are all paywalled.

EdZ wrote:This seems to be aimed more at speed & range sensing than 3D RADAR scanning: a more accurate and precise replacement for the old ultrasonic transducer/receiver pair setup. I can't find any mention of any sort of directional sensing on their website or linked articles, though their papers are all paywalled.

Yeah, I thought that might have been how it worked, but I wasn't sure. I'd love to see how it can be used when it's released.

If you were to mount this in the middle of a small parabolic reflector dish that you rotate, then you could use it for scanning in a similar way to how a laser scanner works ( or tiny version of the old naval radars). I don't think it's like the antenna arrays for 3D radar though, unfortunately.

android78 wrote:If you were to mount this in the middle of a small parabolic reflector dish that you rotate, then you could use it for scanning in a similar way to how a laser scanner works ( or tiny version of the old naval radars). I don't think it's like the antenna arrays for 3D radar though, unfortunately.

Yeah, it looks like the antennas are integrated onto the IC itself which limits their use in anything but a base station with a dish.

EdZ wrote:This seems to be aimed more at speed & range sensing than 3D RADAR scanning: a more accurate and precise replacement for the old ultrasonic transducer/receiver pair setup. I can't find any mention of any sort of directional sensing on their website or linked articles though, their papers are all paywalled.

That seems rather stupid. Why would they intentionaly reduce the amount of customers they get? I must have missed something, anybody know what?

bobv5 wrote:

EdZ wrote:This seems to be aimed more at speed & range sensing than 3D RADAR scanning: a more accurate and precise replacement for the old ultrasonic transducer/receiver pair setup. I can't find any mention of any sort of directional sensing on their website or linked articles though, their papers are all paywalled.

That seems rather stupid. Why would they intentionaly reduce the amount of customers they get? I must have missed something, anybody know what?

Because it's aimed at a certain market that doesn't need positional locating, just ranging, as a drop-in replacement part. That's their market.
Plus, 3D phased array radar is in the realm of multi-million-pound warships and RADAR installations, and requires a heck of a lot of signal processing grunt. Putting all that on a single chip is likely impossible without overheating (even sacrificing range for lower output power, the realtime processing needed is not something you can do on a couple of Core i7s), and would probably be export-restricted as a military device.

Ah, ok.

I didn't explain well, I actually meant pay-walling the docs seemed stupid. Even though I asked the wrong question, I think you still gave the answer I wanted. 10 points for EdZ!

bobv5 wrote:I didn't explain well, I actually meant pay-walling the docs seemed stupid.

Ah.

I think the thinking behind that goes roughly along the lines of: if you aren't willing to pay for the documentation, then you're probably not willing to sling around millions on bulk orders, so they don't want to take the time to deal with you.