The number of autonomous agents in everyday life is expected to scale dramatically over the next decade driven by advances in machine learning, compute power and data availability. These cyber-physical systems will need edge perception: i.e. the capability of being situationally aware in diverse environments and the ability to make real-time decisions exploiting data collected using a network of multi-modal sensors.

One omnipresent information carrier for edge perception is the thermal signal emanating from all objects at non-zero temperature. Here, we build the information theoretic foundations of thermal perception to prove that infrared radiation, even in pitch darkness, carries equivalent amounts of information per detected photon as daytime visible radiation. This opens a new frontier of heat-assisted detection and ranging (HADAR [1]) which can have societal impact similar to existing techniques of Radar, Sonar and Lidar. I will discuss the design and deployment of the thermal voyager : an autonomous navigation agent which exploits passive infrared thermal imaging for semantic segmentation, 3D depth perception and path planning.

Finally, I will explain how this research presents disruptive opportunities for collaborations cross-cutting all the core areas within ECE: computer engineering, signals and systems as well as photonics/solid-state devices.