NeuroRadar: A Neuromorphic Radar Sensor for Low-Power IoT Systems
Kai Zheng, Kun Qian, Timothy Woodford, Xinyu Zhang
Abstract
Radar sensors have recently been explored in the industrial and consumer Internet of Things (IoT). However, such applications often require self-sustainable or untethered operations, which are at odds with the high power consumption of radar. This paper proposes NeuroRadar, a neuromorphic radar sensor, to achieve low-power wireless sensing. NeuroRadar jointly optimizes the analog hardware and the computation model, in order to mimic the highly efficient biological sensing and neural processing system. NeuroRadar features a highly simplified radar front end, which eliminates the power-hungry components in conventional radars. It directly "encodes" ambient motion into spiking signals, which can be processed using spiking neural networks running on energy-efficient neuromorphic computing platforms. We have prototyped NeuroRadar and evaluated its performance in two use cases: gesture sensing and localization. Our experiments demonstrate that NeuroRadar can achieve high sensing accuracy, at orders of magnitude lower power consumption compared with traditional radar.