1,982 research outputs found
Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide
variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable,
measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of
estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a
beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in
the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and
potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these
design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly
searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are
optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally
expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer
that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us
to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the
joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and
settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high
localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS
Distributed and adaptive location identification system for mobile devices
Indoor location identification and navigation need to be as simple, seamless,
and ubiquitous as its outdoor GPS-based counterpart is. It would be of great
convenience to the mobile user to be able to continue navigating seamlessly as
he or she moves from a GPS-clear outdoor environment into an indoor environment
or a GPS-obstructed outdoor environment such as a tunnel or forest. Existing
infrastructure-based indoor localization systems lack such capability, on top
of potentially facing several critical technical challenges such as increased
cost of installation, centralization, lack of reliability, poor localization
accuracy, poor adaptation to the dynamics of the surrounding environment,
latency, system-level and computational complexities, repetitive
labor-intensive parameter tuning, and user privacy. To this end, this paper
presents a novel mechanism with the potential to overcome most (if not all) of
the abovementioned challenges. The proposed mechanism is simple, distributed,
adaptive, collaborative, and cost-effective. Based on the proposed algorithm, a
mobile blind device can potentially utilize, as GPS-like reference nodes,
either in-range location-aware compatible mobile devices or preinstalled
low-cost infrastructure-less location-aware beacon nodes. The proposed approach
is model-based and calibration-free that uses the received signal strength to
periodically and collaboratively measure and update the radio frequency
characteristics of the operating environment to estimate the distances to the
reference nodes. Trilateration is then used by the blind device to identify its
own location, similar to that used in the GPS-based system. Simulation and
empirical testing ascertained that the proposed approach can potentially be the
core of future indoor and GPS-obstructed environments
Embracing Localization Inaccuracy: A Case Study
In recent years, indoor localization has become a hot research topic with some sophisticated solutions reaching accuracy on the order of ten centimeters. While certain classes of applications can justify the corresponding costs that come with these solutions, a wealth of applications have requirements that can be met at much lower cost by accepting lower accuracy. This paper explores one specific application for monitoring patients in a nursing home, showing that sufficient accuracy can be achieved with a carefully designed deployment of low-cost wireless sensor network nodes in combination with a simple RSSI-based localization technique. Notably our solution uses a single radio sample per period, a number that is much lower than similar approaches. This greatly eases the power burden of the nodes, resulting in a significant lifetime increase. This paper evaluates a concrete deployment from summer 2012 composed of fixed anchor motes throughout one floor of a nursing home and mobile units carried by patients. We show how two localization algorithms perform and demonstrate a clear improvement by following a set of simple guidelines to tune the anchor node placement. We show both quantitatively and qualitatively that the results meet the functional and non-functional system requirements
A survey of localization in wireless sensor network
Localization is one of the key techniques in wireless sensor network. The location estimation methods can be classified into target/source localization and node self-localization. In target localization, we mainly introduce the energy-based method. Then we investigate the node self-localization methods. Since the widespread adoption of the wireless sensor network, the localization methods are different in various applications. And there are several challenges in some special scenarios. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these challenges: localization in non-line-of-sight, node selection criteria for localization in energy-constrained network, scheduling the sensor node to optimize the tradeoff between localization performance and energy consumption, cooperative node localization, and localization algorithm in heterogeneous network. Finally, we introduce the evaluation criteria for localization in wireless sensor network
Group-In: Group Inference from Wireless Traces of Mobile Devices
This paper proposes Group-In, a wireless scanning system to detect static or
mobile people groups in indoor or outdoor environments. Group-In collects only
wireless traces from the Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices for group inference.
The key problem addressed in this work is to detect not only static groups but
also moving groups with a multi-phased approach based only noisy wireless
Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSIs) observed by multiple wireless
scanners without localization support. We propose new centralized and
decentralized schemes to process the sparse and noisy wireless data, and
leverage graph-based clustering techniques for group detection from short-term
and long-term aspects. Group-In provides two outcomes: 1) group detection in
short time intervals such as two minutes and 2) long-term linkages such as a
month. To verify the performance, we conduct two experimental studies. One
consists of 27 controlled scenarios in the lab environments. The other is a
real-world scenario where we place Bluetooth scanners in an office environment,
and employees carry beacons for more than one month. Both the controlled and
real-world experiments result in high accuracy group detection in short time
intervals and sampling liberties in terms of the Jaccard index and pairwise
similarity coefficient.Comment: This work has been funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under
Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT and No.871249 LOCUS projects. The
content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the EU.
Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely
with the authors. Proc. of ACM/IEEE IPSN'20, 202
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