An innovative approach to vehicle localization and mapping using lidar and cellular LTE data, enhancing accuracy without relying on GNSS signals.

This technology offers a novel approach to navigation by using LTE signals, providing a viable alternative to traditional GPS systems.

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Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a reversed feedback amplifier design for enhanced mm-wave signal amplification.

This technology introduces a flexible, secure, and scalable approach to creating body area networks (BANs) using textile-integrated metamaterials for advanced healthcare monitoring.

This technology introduces a revolutionary receiver architecture capable of demodulating high-order QAM signals without the need for high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), significantly enhancing communication speed and efficiency.

Researchers from UC San Diego have developed RadSenNet, a new approach of sequential fusing of information from radars and cameras. The key idea of sequential fusion is to fundamentally shift the center of focus in radar-camera fusion systems from cameras to radars. This shift enables their invention (RadSegNet) to achieve all-weather perception benefits of radar sensing. Keeping radars as the primary modality ensures reliability in all situations including occlusions, longrange and bad weather.

Researchers from UC San Diego present a fully-passive, miniaturized, flexible form factor sensor interface titled ZenseTag that uses minimal electronics to read and communicate analog sensor data, directly at radio frequencies (RF). The technology exploits the fundamental principle of resonance, where a sensor's terminal impedance becomes most sensitive to the measured stimulus at its resonant frequency. This enables ZenseTag to read out the sensor variation using only energy harvested from wireless signals. UCSD inventors further demonstrate its implementation with a 15x10mm flexible PCB that connects sensors to a printed antenna and passive RFID ICs, enabling near real-time readout through a performant GUI-enabled software. They showcase ZenseTag's versatility by interfacing commercial force, soil moisture and photodiode sensors. 

Researchers from UC San Diego developed a patent-pending novel Synthesis of Virtual Array Manifold (SVAM) sensing approach for the mmWave single RF chain systems. More specifically, this new technology for sensing leads to faster and more robust beam alignment. UCSD believes this contribution will have significant impact on the traditional paradigm for sensing in mmWave systems.

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This technology revolutionizes health monitoring by integrating smart textiles with body area networks for real-time biometric data collection.

Many people have learned to appreciate the advent of GPS based navigational applications in our daily lives through the use of street level navigation, and many more loathe the same applications when using them to navigate established public transportation systems. Many of these travelers become confused and frustrated when attempting to understand and act on the directions given to them by such existing applications that primarily focus on large-scale street navigation, especially if the user has a visual or cognitive impairment. Several existing applications will not even attempt to aid someone in the navigation of say, a metro, train or bus station, and instead simply inform the user of the label of the route that the application intends the user to take. Without any small-scale directions many people find themselves struggling to figure out what platform or boarding zone they need to use to get on their preferred method of transportation, as well as how to get to these platforms and boarding zones in the first place. These transit hubs, plazas, malls, and the like have long been a pain in the side of developers and users alike when it comes to navigation. Innovation has long been overdue in this space concerning small scale transit plaza navigation, with major players holding large market shares in navigation not even attempting to address this longstanding problem. The only existing application to offer indoor navigation offers very limited as well as inconsistent functionality including only two-dimensional indoor mapping, due to manually uploaded floor plans that are only available in the first place from partnering locations. This has continued to be an issue due to a lack of adoption by existing locations, as each location is required to draw out their floor plan on an antiquated image file and submit it for approval. Solving this problem would ease a large amount of stress for those navigating in areas they are not familiar with, as well as saving time that could possibly make the difference between a missed train and a nearly missed train.

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Extended Reality (XR), broadly encompassing virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies, can potentially revolutionize fields such as education, healthcare, and gaming. The primary ethos for XR is to provide immersive, interactive, and realistic experiences for users. A key component of delivering this user experience is to transfer the physical world into the virtual space. For example, our everyday spaces and objects can be transformed into video game assets (like tennis racquets, swords, or chess pieces) for interactive gaming applications. To enable these applications, we find a common thread — any XR system should localize and track objects in an environment.Extended Reality (XR), broadly encompassing virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies can potentially revolutionize fields such as education, healthcare, and gaming. Applications include VR gaming, full body tracking, warehouse automation.Understanding the location of objects and people in the real world is key to enabling a smooth cyber-physical transition. However, most localization systems today require the deployment of multiple anchors in the environment, which can be very cumbersome to set up.

It is well known that the communication capacity of wireless networks is limited by interference. Depending on the strength of the interference, there are three conventional approaches to this problem. If the interference is very strong, then the receiver can decode the interfering signal and subtract from the desired signal using successive interference cancelation. If the interference signal is very weak compared to the desired signal, it can be treated as noise. The third and most common possibility is when the interference is comparable with the desired signal. In this case the interference can be avoided by orthogonalizing it with the desired signal using techniques such as time division multiple access (TDMA) or frequency division multiple access (FDMA). In addition to interference, wireless networks also experience channel fading. Conventional approaches to wireless networking attempt to combat fading. Depending on the coherence time of the fading, various approaches have been used. For example, fast fading may be mitigated by the use of diversity techniques, interleaving, and error-correcting codes. Certain diversity techniques, such as the use of multiple antennas, has been shown to help combat fading as well as increase multiplexing gain and system capacity. Multiuser diversity scheme is a technique to increase the capacity of wireless networks using multiple antennas at the base station. In this approach the base station selects a mobile device that has the best channel condition, maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). According to some implementations of this approach, K random beams are constructed and information is transmitted to the users with the highest signal-to-noise plus interference ratio (SINR). Searching for the best SINR in the network, however, requires feedback from the mobile devices that scales linearly with the number of users. These implementations also use beamforming, which is complex to implement. In addition, the cooperation requirement is substantial.

         Recent mass evacuation events, including the 2018 Camp Fire and 2023 Maui Fire, have demonstrated shortcomings in our communication abilities during natural disasters and emergencies. Individuals fleeing dangerous areas were unable to obtain fast or accurate information pertaining to open evacuation routes and faced traffic gridlocks, while nearby communities were unprepared for the emergent situation and influx of persons. Climate change is increasing the frequency, areas subject to, and risk-level associated with natural hazards, making effective communication channels that can operate when mobile network-based systems and electric distribution systems are compromised crucial.         To address this need UC Berkeley researchers have developed a mobile network-free communication system that can function during natural disasters and be adapted to most communication devices (mobile phones and laptops). The self-organized, mesh-based and low-power network is embedded into common infrastructure monitoring device nodes (e.g., pre-existing WSN, LoRa, and other LPWAN devices) for effective local communication. Local communication contains dedicated Emergency Messaging and “walkie-talkie” functions, while higher level connectivity through robust gateway architecture and data transmission units allows for real-time internet access, communication with nearby communities, and even global connectivity. The system can provide GPS-free position information using trilateration, which can help identify the location of nodes monitoring important environmental conditions or allowing users to navigate.

Networks of connectivity-enabled devices, known as internet of things or IoT, involve interrelated devices that connect and exchange data with other IoT devices and the cloud. As the number of IoT devices and their applications continue to significantly increase, managing and administering edge and access networks have become increasingly more challenging. Currently, there are approximately 31 billion ‘‘things’’ connected to the internet, with a projected rise to 75 billion devices by 2025. Because of IoT interconnectivity and ubiquitous device use, assessing the risks, designing/specifying what’s reasonable, and implementing controls can be overwhelming to conventional frameworks. Any approach to better IoT network security, for example by improved detection and denial or restriction of access by unauthorized devices, must consider its impact on performance such as speed, power use, interoperability, and scalability. The IoT network’s physical and MAC layers are not impenetrable and have many known threats, especially identity-based attacks such as MAC spoofing events. Common network infrastructure uses WPA2 or IEEE 802.11i to help protect users and their devices and connected infrastructure. However, the risk of MAC spoofing remains, as bad actors leverage public tools on 802.11 commodity hardware, or intercept sensitive data packets at scale, to access users physical layer data, and can lead to wider tampering and manipulation of hardware-level parameters.

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Researchers from UC San Diego have developed MIRAGE, an algorithm that the user can employ on their devices (e.g., smartphone) to maintain their location privacy if desired without compromising their Wi-Fi’s quality of service.The innovation would be additional software on the user's WiFI device, enabling which would make the listening WiFI AP infrastructure unable to detect the user's location unless and until the user is willing to provide it. All of this happens without any compromise to the data rate of the WiFi-user communication.

This invention is a new system of algorithms for decoding linear block codes. Given the received message block, the decoding algorithm is designed to recover the truly transmitted symbols.Engineers from UC San Diego have invented a decoding system that can be shown to achieve near-optimal decoding performance for general linear codes of dimension less than or equal to 128. In particular, for Reed–Muller codes, this new algorithm is the first to be shown with simulation evidence to achieve the optimal block error rate for communications over binary symmetric channels. This invention employs multiple Monte Carlo Markov chain subdecoders in parallel, which is a novel idea compared to the existing art. 

Millimeter wave sensing has recently attracted a lot of attention given its environmental robust nature. In situations where visual sensors like cameras fail to perform, mmwave radars can be used to achieve reliable performance. However, because of the poor scattering performance and lack of texture in millimeter waves, radars can not be used in several situations that require precise identification of objects.  A video demonstration of R-fiducial could be found at https://streamable.com/7ax59s 

Frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) is a channel access method used in some multiple-access protocols. FDMA allows multiple users to send data through a single communication channel, such as a coaxial cable or microwave beam, by dividing the bandwidth of the channel into separate non-overlapping frequency sub-channels and allocating each sub-channel to a separate user. FDMA is highly power‐efficient and can work with single antenna base stations. This is because FDMA separates users in spectrum and then samples the net increased bandwidth.Digital beamforming is highly spectrum efficient, however needs multiple antenna base stations. This is because to resolve the multiple users interfering we need to sample the signals from multiple antennas to cancel out the interferences, which requires a dedicated downconversion chain per antenna. The requirement of multiple downconversion chains makes the solution power hungry, and thus has limited adoption.

Antennas are transducers that convert electronic signals into electromagnetic (EM) waves and vice-versa. An antenna can be electrically excited by a transmission line, an aperture coupling, or wirelessly by another source of electromagnetic wave. One type of antenna is a patch antenna formed by mounting a first sheet of metal over a second sheet of metal serving as a ground plane. Patch antennas have a low profile and are thus suitable for mounting on a surface. However, patch antennas may be less efficient and exhibit higher than desirable return loss. A dielectric resonator antenna (DRA), which that includes a dielectric resonator disposed on top of another substrate in which the dielectric resonator is housed, may exhibit significantly lower losses than traditional metallic patch antennas. Nevertheless, conventional dielectric resonator antennas have limited beam steering capabilities. In particular, conventional dielectric resonator antennas exhibit a low quality factor (Q factor) at millimeter wave (mm-wave) frequencies.