Digital maps will revolutionize our experience of perceiving and navigating indoor environments. While today we rely only on the representation of the outdoors, the mapping of indoors is mainly a part of the traditional SLAM problem where robots discover the surrounding and perform self-localization. Nonetheless, robot deployment prevents from a large diffusion and fast mapping of indoors and, further, they are usually equipped with laser and vision technology that fail in scarce visibility conditions. To this end, a possible solution is to turn future personal devices into personal radars as a milestone towards the automatic generation of indoor maps using massive array technology at millimeter-waves, already in place for communications. In this application-oriented paper, we will describe the main achievements attained so far to develop the personal radar concept, using ad-hoc collected experimental data, and by discussing possible future directions of investigation.
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