EAGER: Systems of Holographic Optical Tags for Scalable and Collaborative Mobile Infrastructures

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

Mobile systems benefit from infrastructures that enable safe, reliable, and scalable mobility. Within vehicular mobile systems, much research has considered communication and system technologies in which vehicles collaborate to share location and route planning information. These systems have strict constraints for delay and reliability. The communication networks of the mobile systems typically rely upon radio frequency-based approaches. Radio frequency networks have limitations regarding high energy consumption, transmission rates, and security attacks. To overcome these limitations, innovative optical wireless communication (OWC) approaches have been introduced. OWC approaches show promise due to their potential high data rates and range, security advantages, and low cost, delay, and power consumption. However, most existing OWC-based techniques for vehicular mobile system enable communication only in a single direction. This reduces the communication field of view and therefore the ability to share location and route planning information in a mobile system. The project’s novelties are to explore new OWC-based techniques to improve capabilities for communication in multiple directions at high data rates and provide techniques for accurate positioning of mobile nodes to support scalable and collaborative mobile systems. The project's broader significance and importance are improving the capabilities of traffic control, and the collaboration of robots, drones, and mobile vehicular systems. The objective of this project is to support reliable and scalable collaborative communication and localization for mobile systems via OWC-based technologies with three research components: (1) holographic optical tag design to enable smart collaboration among mobile nodes for improved performance, such as more accurate positioning, better decoding, full directional communication and higher throughput; (2) distributed mobile localization via collaboration of low-cost holographic optical tags to support real-time, dynamic, and scalable distributed systems for mobile localization; and (3) lightweight middleware design for multi-to-multi networking to provide full direction instead of monodirectional communication and to form dynamic multi-to-multi mobile networks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.