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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on optical sensors such as cameras and lidar for autonomous operation. However, such optical sensors are error-prone in bad lighting, inclement weather conditions including fog and smoke, and around textureless or transparent surfaces. In this paper, we ask: is it possible to fly UAVs without relying on optical sensors, i.e., can UAVs fly without seeing? We present BatMobility, a lightweight mmWave radar-only perception system for UAVs that eliminates the need for optical sensors. BatMobility enables two core functionalities for UAVs – radio flow estimation (a novel FMCW radar-based alternative for optical flow based on surface-parallel doppler shift) and radar-based collision avoidance. We build BatMobility using commodity sensors and deploy it as a real-time system on a small off-the-shelf quadcopter running an unmodified flight controller. Our evaluation shows that BatMobility achieves comparable or better performance than commercial-grade optical sensors across a wide range of scenarios. 

Machine Learning (ML) is an increasingly popular tool for designing wireless systems, both for communication and sensing applications. We design and evaluate the impact of practically feasible adversarial attacks against such ML-based wireless systems. In doing so, we solve challenges that are unique to the wireless domain: lack of synchronization between a benign device and the adversarial device, and the effects of the wireless channel on adversarial noise. We build, RAFA (RAdio Frequency Attack), the first hardware-implemented adversarial attack platform against ML-based wireless systems, and evaluate it against two state-of-the-art communication and sensing approaches at the physical layer. Our results show that both these systems experience a significant performance drop in response to the adversarial attack