Science fiction is becoming reality, with robots that can “see” through walls, boxes, and clutter to identify objects. The latest innovation comes from MIT researchers and scientists. Researchers developed a groundbreaking imaging technique called mmNorm. It’s a promising technology that could redefine warehouse quality control, refine robotic manipulation, and improve security.

Revolutionizing Hidden Object Imaging

Researchers leveraged millimeter wave (mmWave) signals, the same technology that powers Wi-Fi, to construct 3D images of hidden objects. While traditional radar methods struggle with smaller objects, mmNorm uses a crucial property called specularity to identify small, complex shapes.

MIT research assistant Laura Dodds, the paper’s lead author, said, “Relying on specularity, our idea is to try to estimate not just the location of a reflection in the environment, but also the direction of the surface at that point.” This allows the system to reconstruct an object’s curvature in great detail.

Researchers say the results are impressive. In tests, mmNorm achieved a 96% reconstruction accuracy on common objects with complex shapes, such as utensils and power tools. According to the researchers, it significantly outperformed state-of-the-art methods, which achieved 78% accuracy. It’s a big leap in precision that didn’t demand additional bandwidth. As a result, it opens up an array of potential applications that researchers want to explore.

“We’ve been interested in this problem for quite a while, but we’ve been hitting a wall because past methods, while they were mathematically elegant, weren’t getting us where we needed to go,” said Fadel Adib, senior author of the paper. “We needed to come up with a very different way of using these signals than what has been used for more than half a century to unlock new types of applications.”

The various potential applications span industries, domestic, and even the military. For example, a robot with imaging technology could identify objects in a cluttered tool chest in the garage, providing a safety measure. It could also be implemented in an augmented reality headset that a warehouse worker could use to see clear objects hidden behind solid objects.

For security or defense, the imaging could integrate with existing systems such as airport security scanners.

“Our qualitative results really speak for themselves,” said research assistant Tara Boroushaki. “And the amount of improvement you see makes it easier to develop applications that use these high-resolution 3D reconstructions for new tasks.”