SPAWC 2026: WSL Presents Research on RIS-Aided Near-Field SLAM

The 2026 IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Wireless Communications (SPAWC) was held from September 6 to 9 in Athens, Greece. Dr. Jeongwan Kang from WSL attended the conference to present his most recent research.

Dr. Jeongwan Kang presented “Single-Snapshot Near-Field SLAM in RIS-Aided SISO Systems: A Manifold-Constrained Inference,” developed in collaboration with researchers from Hanyang University and Inha University. The study proposes a simultaneous localization and mapping framework that recovers both the user position and the surrounding scatterer map from a single snapshot in a distributed RIS-aided single-antenna system. By exploiting the phase-modulation diversity induced by the RIS tiles, the approach separates overlapping propagation paths in the delay–code domain and confines each scatterer to a two-dimensional geometric manifold, replacing the combinatorial path-association search with a tractable surface search.

Numerical simulations demonstrated centimeter-level localization and mapping accuracy without the error floor observed in compressed-sensing and interference-cancellation baselines, while reducing computation time by nearly four orders of magnitude compared with joint maximum-likelihood estimation. The results highlight the potential of geometry-constrained inference for low-complexity near-field sensing in future RIS-assisted 6G systems.

▲ Dr. Jeongwan Kang presenting research results during poster session (Athens, Greece) ▲

▲ Dr. Jeongwan Kang at SPAWC (Athens, Greece) ▲