The Propagation Group

Georgia Tech ECE Research Group

Home of the Georgia Tech Propagation Group

News and Resources for the Durgin Research Group

Cheng Qi-led Team wins 3rd Place Nokia Bell Labs Prize

Posted on Written by

Nokia held a virtual awards ceremony on December 3 and announced the winners of the 2020 Bell Labs Prize, a competition that recognizes disruptive innovations that will define the next industrial revolution. Proposals were received from 208 academics in 26 countries, and a team from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) consisting of GTPG member Cheng Qi, Francesco Amato, and Greg Durgin was presented with the third-place prize.  Read more here.

Motion Capture Through Walls, Long Distances

Posted on Written by

Fine-scale Through-Wall Positioning Using Tunneling RFID Tags
Cheng Qi;Francesco Amato;Billy Kihei;Gregory D. Durgin
2020 IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID)

It has been shown that Tunneling Tags enable long-range communications and localization in line-of-sight (LoS) with an RFID reader operating in the 5.8 GHz band. This paper demonstrates how a received signal phase-based positioning method can be applied to localize tags in a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenario. In particular, a Tunneling Tag provides 20.0 dB more received signal strength than a Semi-passive one when they communicate through a plaster wall. Moreover, when calibration is applied, average distance estimation accuracies of 12.1 cm (percentage error: 2.1%) and 9.2 cm (percentage error: 1.4%) are achieved in LoS and NLoS, respectively. The low-power requirement of the Tunneling Tag and the low EIRP of the reader suggest that these tags can significantly contribute to developing new and low-powered indoor positioning applications.