By Adam Zee

A new imaging technique developed by MIT researchers could enable quality-control robots in a warehouse to peer through a cardboard shipping box and see that the handle of a mug buried under packing peanuts is broken.

Their approach leverages millimeter wave (mmWave) signals, the same type of signals used in Wi-Fi, to create accurate 3D reconstructions of objects that are blocked from view.

“We’ve been interested in this problem for quite a while, but we’ve been hitting a wall because past methods, while they were mathematically elegant, weren’t getting us where we needed to go. We needed to come up with a very different way of using these signals than what has been used for more than half a century to unlock new types of applications,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab, and senior author of a paper on mmNorm.

Adib is joined on the paper by research assistants Laura Dodds, the lead author, and Tara Boroushaki, and former postdoc Kaichen Zhou. The research was recently presented at the Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services.