Shijian Gao
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China
Shijian Gao received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota. He was a Senior RF Engineer at the Samsung SoC Laboratory, San Diego. In 2024, he joined the Internet of Things Thrust at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) as an Assistant Professor. His research interests include statistical signal processing, embodied networking, AI-RAN, and low-altitude systems. He is a co-recipient of the 2021 MICCAI Young Scientist Paper Award, the 2024 China Communications Society Science and Technology Paper Award, the 2025 IEEE WCSP Best Paper Award, the 2025 CCHI Best Paper Award, and the 2026 IEEE Communications Society Best Survey Paper Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal on Advances in Signal Processing and IEEE Communications Letters.
Radio maps provide the essential foundation for low-altitude networking systems. Unlike terrestrial radio maps that are typically generated via drive test measurements, mapping the air-ground environment requires the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This shift introduces two formidable challenges in uncharted 3D scenarios. First, sparse radio measurements and incomplete geometric observations hinder accurate reconstruction. Second, the large 3D action space and strict power constraints from high spectrum scanner energy consumption make informative exploration difficult. To address these issues, we propose 3D uncertainty aware radio active mapping (3D-URAM), a closed loop active perception framework that decouples the mapping process into two offline trained stages. In Stage I, a Bayesian UNet is developed to recover radio maps from sparse measurements and partial geometry while providing calibrated predictive uncertainty. In Stage II, a dynamic probabilistic roadmap and a transformer based waypoint selection policy trained via proximal policy optimization maximize long horizon uncertainty reduction under travel budgets. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D-URAM reduces reconstruction error by over 50% compared to representative baselines. Real-world field tests within a 300m×200m×100m space also validate the potential of active radio map reconstruction.