Stabilizing Dynamic Backscatter for Swift and Accurate Object Tracking

Accurate and high-speed object movement tracking systems often face significant challenges due to signal instability caused by the object’s movement and rotation. To address these issues, we present STABack, a novel object tracking system using backscatter tags and accelerometer sensors, designed for high-accuracy, high-speed movement tracking. We developed an amplitude stabilization algorithm which uses envelope detection to reduce the impact of high-frequency movement on the signal, and uses dynamic threshold output to lower the BER in backscatter demodulation. Our method reduces the BER by 0.3757 compared to the regular demodulation method, resulting in a final BER of 0.07. Our evaluation of the STABack prototype shows that it achieves a median distance measurement accuracy of 6.45 cm with a standard deviation of 6.95 cm, under the condition of a speed of 120 cm. The attitude angle estimation’s mean error is under 7 degrees. The system’s accuracy in detecting the target object’s trajectory is as high as 99%, and it can still decode with a bit error rate of no more than 0.034 at a speed of 166 cm/s. The power consumption of our system prototype is only 38.54 μW based on our experimental results. Overall, our results demonstrate that STABack can accurately estimate the movement and rotation of target objects in unstable backscatter channels.