Chameleon-like intelligent camouflage metasurface

Abstract

Humans have been long dreaming of obtaining the ability of changing electromagnetic (EM) attributes intelligently according to the environment so as to camouflage just as chameleons do. Thanks to the unprecedented high degree of freedom in manipulating EM waves, metasurfaces can mimic EM characteristics of various environments vividly and have pushed a giant step towards this long-desired dream. Nevertheless, for most metasurfaces, the EM characteristics are fixed and thus cannot be altered according to changing environments, which hinders their applications in intelligent scenarios such as moving target camouflage. With the aim to achieve intelligent camouflage, in this work we propose a chameleon-like framework for intelligent camouflage based on EM metasurface, which integrates transfer-learning-empowered perceptron into a reconfigurable metasurface. As a demonstrative example, a chameleon-like intelligent camouflage metasurface (CLICM) system with robust extendibility was developed and measured in laboratory. The system can dynamically control the reflection spectrum in 5.1–6.5 GHz according to what it sees. Both the simulation and experiment results verify this framework. This work provides a perceptron-algorithm-metasurface framework with robust extendibility for intelligent EM manipulation and may find wide applications in camouflage and wireless communication.