Non-Line-of-Sight Around the Corner Human Presence Detection Using Commodity WiFi Devices

Abstract

As robots penetrate into real-world environments, practical human-robot co-existence issues such as the requirement for safe human-robot interaction are becoming increasingly important. In almost every vision-capable mobile robot, the field of view of the robot is occluded by the presence of obstacles such as indoor walls, furniture, and humans. Such occlusions force the robots to be stationary or to move slowly so that they can avoid collisions and violations of entry into the personal spaces of humans. We see this as a barrier to robots being able to optimally plan motions with reasonable speeds. In order to solve this problem, we propose to augment the sensing capability of a robot by using a commodity WiFi receiver. Using our proposed method, a robot can observe the changes in the properties of received signals, and thus be able to infer whether a human is present behind the wall or obstacles, which enhances its ability to plan and navigate efficiently and intelligently.