"Radar" Google Soli continues to evolve
In 2015, Google showed some interesting new products at its Google I / O conference. One of them is Project Soli mini-radar, which allows you to change the experience of human interaction with electronic devices. News about this technology from time to time appeared, but not so that very often.
And it was unclear whether Google plans to continue developing its technology or abandon the project in the same way as it has happened with other ideas, including the project of the Project Ara modular phone. But the other day, several news about Project Soli appeared on the network at once.
It turned out that the technology adapted for the recognition of fairly small items. For example, a joint team of Canadian and British engineers was able to create a system based on Google Soli that can even determine the number of sheets in a stack of paper, as well as recognize plastic cards.
Scientists presented data on their research at the IMWUT 2018 conference. Experts created a hardware platform based on the Intel NUC mini PC and Google Soli. This platform allows you to process the radio signal in real time.
Each received signal is evaluated by 661 criteria, after which the information is “studied” by a specially trained neural network. The purpose of the analysis is to identify objects with the closest possible set of features.
As a result, the system learned to identify even very similar objects, for example, sheets of paper in a pack or playing cards. The accuracy of identification of individual cards is 99.4%. In the case of evaluation of sheets from a pack of paper (the pack is not so big, there are only 20 sheets in it), the recognition accuracy drops to 88.6%. Accuracy of recognition of bank cards is 99.5%.
It is worth noting that the “mini-radar” works with the frequency spectrum 57-64 GHz, the number of channels reaches eight. The principle of operation is quite simple - Soli emits a signal using two elements and receives reflected signals using four elements. As a result, the system recognizes even the smallest radio signal configuration changes. The size of the working device is only 10 * 8 mm, taking into account the array of antennas. There are no moving parts, as there is no sensitivity to the level of illumination.
At the very end of last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave permission to increase the power of the Soli emitter.