Swarun Kumar



NSF Award (2007786): NeTS: Small: Harnessing Wireless Actuation

This webpage tracks the current progress of our funded project with the NSF. Our sincere thanks to the National Science Foundation for supporting our research.
Project Goals
The project will perform a deep exploration of a new category of wireless systems -- systems that actively use wireless signals to heat objects of interest. While there has been much work on using wireless signals to sense the environment, the ability of wireless signals to influence the environment -- i.e., wireless actuation -- has been relatively less explored. Perhaps the most common wireless actuation equipment is the microwave oven, which heats food using radio waves, yet lacks the ability to precisely and programmatically cook food according to pre-specified patterns of heating. Through this project, we aim to develop a mechanism to effectively control wireless signals to heat objects-of-interest at a significantly finer granularity. Beyond cooking, the proposed work targets applications in manufacturing and control of soft robots. The proposed work has a detailed integrated education and outreach program including curriculum development and summer workshops for K-12 students from underrepresented communities in Greater Pittsburgh. The proposed work will lead to the following intellectual contributions: (1) The design of microwave-safe equipment to sense and modify wireless signals within a chamber; (2) The development of algorithms and system design that actively heat the object-of-interest according to the desired pattern in 3-D space both with and without physical movement; (3) An end-to-end implementation of the system and evaluation of performance for diverse tasks, including cooking, programmatically applying heat for 3-D fabrication and design of heat-based soft robotic systems. The proposed work will more broadly impact multiple disciplines including wireless systems, robotics, manufacturing, and human-computer interfaces.
Activities and Outcomes
Intellectual Merit The proposed research led to multiple accepted papers at UbiComp and MobiCom. The research has been demonstrated on commodity wireless hardware.
  • Wireless Actuation for Soft Electronics-free Robots, Jingxian Wang, Yiwen Song, Mason Zadan, Yuyi Shen, Vanessa Chen, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, MobiCom 2023
  • Navigating Soft Robots through Wireless Heating, Yiwen Song, Mason Zadan, Kushaan Misra, Zefang Li, Jingxian Wang, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, ICRA 2023
  • PLatter: On the Feasibility of Building-scale Power Line Backscatter, Junbo Zhang, Elahe Soltanaghaei, Artur Balanuta, Reese Grimsley, Swarun Kumar and Anthony Rowe, NSDI 2022
  • Toolbox Release: A WiFi-Based Relative Bearing Sensor for Robotics, Ninad Jadhav, Weiying Wang, Diana Zhang, Swarun Kumar and Stephanie Gil, IROS 2022
  • Ultra Low-Latency Backscatter for Fast-moving Location Tracking, Jingxian Wang, Vaishnavi Ranganathan, Jonathan Lester and Swarun Kumar, UbiComp 2022
  • Locating Everyday Objects using NFC Textiles, Jingxian Wang (Co-Primary), Junbo Zhang (Co-Primary), Ke Li, Chengfeng Pan, Carmel Majidi and Swarun Kumar, IPSN 2021 (Best Paper Award)
Broader Impacts Two graduate students and three undergraduate students have been trained during the course of this research. The PI participated in several events organized by the Gelfand Center at CMU which invites groups of K-12 students and teachers to the CMU campus to learn about state-of-the-art research.
Personnel
Faculty
  • Swarun Kumar (PI)
Students
  • Haojian Jin
  • Jingxian Wang