Doppler-aided Position-Velocity Tracking of Hidden Objects using mmWave Radar

Overview & Synopsis

Safe indoor operation requires autonomous tracking of objects that are not directly visible to the robot. Optical non-line-of-sight (NLoS) methods depend on ambient lighting and scene geometry or on weak multi-bounce returns that need long acquisitions. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar offers an attractive alternative: walls act as reflectors for mmWave signals, and frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars enable fast, practical measurement of range, angle, and velocity. However, the low resolution of these radars leads to spatially ambiguous observations. The Doppler information, although particularly sensitive to target motion, remains underexplored in indoor NLoS localization: existing methods emphasize spatial representations and either collapse or discard the Doppler dimension before learning. To leverage the complete Range-Azimuth-Doppler (RAD) information, we acquire the first indoor NLoS radar dataset that pairs sequential RAD measurements with synchronized position and velocity ground truth under controlled variations in motion: 576 sequences totaling 720,856 frames across 12 trajectories of a mobile robot moving along varying speeds, starting positions, and material configurations. We then formulate NLoS tracking as sequential position-velocity estimation rather than frame-wise localization: a shared 3-D encoder processes the full RAD representation of consecutive frames, separate recurrent branches estimate position and velocity, and post-inference refinement combines the two into a motion-consistent trajectory. Our method achieves 8.95cm position and 1.75cm/s velocity errors on held-out trajectories and generalizes to unseen scenarios involving a moving human target. Together, our dataset and tracker establish a benchmark for tracking hidden moving targets with a low-cost radar.