Dancing Waltz with Ghosts

TLDR

mmWave sensing exploits short wavelength and large bandwidth to capture fine 1‑D micro‑displacements along the line‑of‑sight. This work aims to extend mmWave capability to resolve 2‑D micro‑displacements. By exploiting spatial separability of multipath reflections, GWaltz coherently combines ghost multipath signals and applies novel processing to reconstruct sub‑mm 2‑D rotor orbits. Evaluated on a commercial mmWave radar, GWaltz achieves an absolute error of about 8.42 µm for 100 µm‑diameter rotor orbits.

Abstract

Recently, mmWave has been widely used in fine-grained sensing applications due to its short wavelength and large bandwidth. One mmWave device usually can measure the target's 1D micro-displacement along the line-of-sight (LOS) direction. In this work, we try to empower mmWave with the capability of measuring 2D micro-displacements. Our insight is that although the mmWave reflection from one path contains only 1D observation, the spatial separability of mmWave offers an opportunity to separate multipath reflections from the received signal. Combining the coherent observations from multipath reflections can restore the 2D orbit of the target. Based on this insight, we present GWaltz, a mmWave sensing system that manages to measure sub-mm-level 2D orbits of rotating machinery. In GWaltz, we first reveal the relationship between the rotor's movement and the observed ghost multipath reflections (GMRs) and then design a set of novel signal processing techniques to restore the rotor orbit from the poor-quality GMR signals. We implement GWaltz with a commercial mmWave radar, and our evaluation results show that it achieves an absolute error of about 8.42um when measuring 100um-diameter rotor orbits.