This paper presents the design and implementation of SPiDR, an ultra-low-power spatial sensing system for miniature mobile robots. This acoustic sensor produces a cross-sectional map of the eld-of-view using only one speaker/microphone pair. While it is challenging to have enough spatial diversity of signal with a single omnidirectional source, we leverage sound's interaction with small structures to create a 3D-printed passive lter, called a stencil, that can project spatially coded signals on a region at a ne granularity. The system receives a linear combination of the reections from nearby objects and applies a novel power-aware depth-map reconstruction algorithm. The algorithm rst estimates the approximate locations of the objects in the scene and then iteratively applies fractional multi-resolution inversion. SPiDR consumes only 10<, of power to generate a depth-map in real-world scenario with over 80% structural similarity score with the scene.
CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization ! Embedded and cyberphysical systems; Sensors and actuators.