Simultaneously Intelligent Sensing and Beamforming Based on an Adaptive Information Metasurface

Due to its ability to adapt to a variety of electromagnetic (EM) environments, the sensing-enabled metasurface has garnered significant attention. However, large-scale EM-field sensing to obtain more information is still very challenging. Here, an adaptive information metasurface is proposed to enable intelligent sensing and wave manipulating simultaneously or more specifically, to realize intelligent target localization and beam tracking adaptively. The metasurface is composed of an array of meta-atoms, and each is loaded with two PIN diodes and a sensing-channel structure, for polarization-insensitive and programmable beamforming and sensing. By controlling the state of the PIN diode, the proposed meta-atom has 1-bit phase response in the designed frequency band, while the sensing loss keeps higher than -10 dB for both "ON" and "OFF" states. Hence there is nearly no interaction between the beamforming and sensing modes. Experiments are conducted to show multiple functions of the metasurface, including intelligent target sensing and self-adaptive beamforming, and the measured results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations and theoretical calculations.