Adaptive Near-Field Imaging with Robotic Arrays

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in phased-array imaging of an unknown area using narrowband RF signals and arrays synthesized by an unmanned vehicle. Typical phased array imaging approaches use fixed or pre-determined array configurations for imaging, which are not usually informative for the whole area. In this paper, we then propose an iterative adaptive imaging approach where we identify the uncertain regions in an initial image that need to be sensed better, find the optimal array location and orientation for such a sensing task and finally combine the new image with the initial image to obtain a better overall imaging quality. Such an approach is easily enabled by using robots to synthesize arrays. We validate our proposed approach with numerical simulations and show that an adaptive approach improves the imaging quality as compared to imaging with fixed arrays.