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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		How researchers have given some robots x-ray vision
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:03
	Publish Date:		2016-07-14 19:00:00
	Description:		Wi-fi has become ubiquitous in our world as a wireless way to get access to the Internet, but what if radio waves could be used to sense the environment? Yasamin Mostofi, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara has been using wi-fi signals to basically give x-ray vision to robots and unmanned vehicles. "Can they image objects? Can they see through walls? Can they count people? Can they localize people?" Such technology could be used in security, search and rescue scenarios, ‘smart homes’ and even at archeological sites. "The robots basically have everyday wi-fi cards that we all have in our laptops and a directional antenna. So, one robot transmits and that transmission goes through the object and the objects interact with it, depending on their material property, their location. And in a sense we can see they leave a signature on a signal and that signature is what we’re trying to use to figure out something about the object."
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