Electronic devices imbued with echolocation

The scientists at Glasgow University used the speakers and microphone from a laptop to generate and receive acoustic waves in the kilohertz range, and also used an antenna to do the same with radio-frequency sounds in the gigahertz range, collecting the data as a single person moved through a room. They simultaneously recorded data about the room using a time-of-flight camera which measures the dimensions of the room and provides a low-resolution image.

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Repeating this process hundreds of times, they used the combined sound and camera data to train an algorithm to associate specific delays in the echoes with images. Over time, the algorithm was able to generate its own images based on the echolocation data. The work is published in Physical Review Letters.

“Echolocation in animals is a remarkable ability, and science has managed to recreate the ability to generate three-dimensional images from reflected echoes in a number of different ways, like RADAR and LiDAR,” said co-lead author Dr Alex Turpin, from Glasgow’s School of Computing Science and School of Physics and Astronomy.