Rotatable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communication System with Visual Recognition: A Prototype Implementation
Liang Dai, Beixiong Zheng, Yanhua Tan, Lipeng Zhu, Fangjiong Chen, Rui Zhang
TL;DR
The paper addresses limited spatial degrees of freedom in traditional fixed-antenna systems by proposing a rotatable antenna (RA) that provides dynamic 3D orientation with potentially lower hardware costs. A prototype integrates a mechanically driven RA with a vision-recognition module (YOLO for detection and DeepSORT for tracking) to provide real-time user direction information and drive a PID-controlled servo for orientation, effectively turning RF angle estimation into an image-based tracking problem. The RF front-end uses USRPs to process signals, and evaluations at a carrier frequency of 5.8 GHz with 16-QAM, 10 dBm transmit power, and 2 Mbps demonstrate that the RA maintains stable received power as the user moves, e.g., the azimuth varies from $- rac{\pi}{2}$ to $\frac{\pi}{2}$ with the zenith fixed at $\theta = 0^{\circ}$. Results show significant coverage gains over a fixed-antenna system, validating the practicality of vision-guided RA deployment for real-time, high-DoF wireless communication.
Abstract
Rotatable antenna (RA) is an emerging technology that has great potential to exploit additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) by flexibly altering the three-dimensional (3D) orientation/boresight of each antenna. In this demonstration, we present a prototype of the RA-enabled wireless communication system with a visual recognition module to evaluate the performance gains provided by the RA in practical environments. In particular, a mechanically-driven RA is developed by integrating a digital servo motor, a directional antenna, and a microcontroller, which enables the dynamic adjustment of the RA orientation. Moreover, the orientation adjustment of the RA is guided by the user's direction information provided by the visual recognition module, thereby significantly enhancing system response speed and self-orientation accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the RA-enabled communication system achieves significant improvement in communication coverage performance compared to the conventional fixed antenna system.