MSCA-PF: An Energy-Efficient AI Powered Portable Radar System for Human Activity Recognition (AIRHAR)
Radar systems have been used in ambient sensing to track various subjects using electromagnetic waves. Thanks to the increasing capability of artificial intelligence algorithms in solving classification tasks, human activity detection (HAR) using radar systems has become possible. However, most previous solutions use bulky fixed radar systems with tens to hundreds of watts of power consumption, requiring rigid wall plug connections, making them environmentally unfriendly and difficult to use in applications like indoor security, healthcare, and mobile robots.
In this project, we aim to develop a portable radar system for HAR by following a hardware-software co-design approach to significantly reduce the signal processing energy consumption compared to conventional radar-based HAR systems. On the software side, we will explore novel time-domain feature extraction methods to reduce the energy consumption of radar data analysis by at least 2 times. We will also apply brain-inspired neuromorphic principles to reduce the energy cost of state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures by 50 times, enabling the solution of radar-based HAR tasks. On the hardware side, we will develop artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator hardware based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to decrease the hardware energy consumption in radar data processing by at least 10 times.
Overall, we expect the project results to revolutionize the paradigm of radar data processing, achieving over 20 times the overall system energy reduction. This will significantly contribute to the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions defined in the European Green Deal. The developed energy-efficient AI-powered portable radar system for HAR is promising for initiating a commercialized product in indoor security, healthcare, and mobile robot applications, and it is expected to be competitive in the rapidly growing Internet-of-Things market, valued at USD 2400 billion by 2029.