16,563 research outputs found
It's the Human that Matters: Accurate User Orientation Estimation for Mobile Computing Applications
Ubiquity of Internet-connected and sensor-equipped portable devices sparked a
new set of mobile computing applications that leverage the proliferating
sensing capabilities of smart-phones. For many of these applications, accurate
estimation of the user heading, as compared to the phone heading, is of
paramount importance. This is of special importance for many crowd-sensing
applications, where the phone can be carried in arbitrary positions and
orientations relative to the user body. Current state-of-the-art focus mainly
on estimating the phone orientation, require the phone to be placed in a
particular position, require user intervention, and/or do not work accurately
indoors; which limits their ubiquitous usability in different applications. In
this paper we present Humaine, a novel system to reliably and accurately
estimate the user orientation relative to the Earth coordinate system.
Humaine requires no prior-configuration nor user intervention and works
accurately indoors and outdoors for arbitrary cell phone positions and
orientations relative to the user body. The system applies statistical analysis
techniques to the inertial sensors widely available on today's cell phones to
estimate both the phone and user orientation. Implementation of the system on
different Android devices with 170 experiments performed at different indoor
and outdoor testbeds shows that Humaine significantly outperforms the
state-of-the-art in diverse scenarios, achieving a median accuracy of
averaged over a wide variety of phone positions. This is
better than the-state-of-the-art. The accuracy is bounded by the error in the
inertial sensors readings and can be enhanced with more accurate sensors and
sensor fusion.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 11th International Conference on
Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services
(Mobiquitous 2014
RIDI: Robust IMU Double Integration
This paper proposes a novel data-driven approach for inertial navigation,
which learns to estimate trajectories of natural human motions just from an
inertial measurement unit (IMU) in every smartphone. The key observation is
that human motions are repetitive and consist of a few major modes (e.g.,
standing, walking, or turning). Our algorithm regresses a velocity vector from
the history of linear accelerations and angular velocities, then corrects
low-frequency bias in the linear accelerations, which are integrated twice to
estimate positions. We have acquired training data with ground-truth motions
across multiple human subjects and multiple phone placements (e.g., in a bag or
a hand). The qualitatively and quantitatively evaluations have demonstrated
that our algorithm has surprisingly shown comparable results to full Visual
Inertial navigation. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to integrate
sophisticated machine learning techniques with inertial navigation, potentially
opening up a new line of research in the domain of data-driven inertial
navigation. We will publicly share our code and data to facilitate further
research
Towards Comfortable Cycling: A Practical Approach to Monitor the Conditions in Cycling Paths
This is a no brainer. Using bicycles to commute is the most sustainable form
of transport, is the least expensive to use and are pollution-free. Towns and
cities have to be made bicycle-friendly to encourage their wide usage.
Therefore, cycling paths should be more convenient, comfortable, and safe to
ride. This paper investigates a smartphone application, which passively
monitors the road conditions during cyclists ride. To overcome the problems of
monitoring roads, we present novel algorithms that sense the rough cycling
paths and locate road bumps. Each event is detected in real time to improve the
user friendliness of the application. Cyclists may keep their smartphones at
any random orientation and placement. Moreover, different smartphones sense the
same incident dissimilarly and hence report discrepant sensor values. We
further address the aforementioned difficulties that limit such crowd-sourcing
application. We evaluate our sensing application on cycling paths in Singapore,
and show that it can successfully detect such bad road conditions.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Accepted by IEEE 4th World Forum on Internet of
Things (WF-IoT) 201
Microelectromechanical system gravimeters as a new tool for gravity imaging
A microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gravimeter has been manufactured with a sensitivity of 40 ppb in an integration time of 1 s. This sensor has been used to measure the Earth tides: the elastic deformation of the globe due to tidal forces. No such measurement has been demonstrated before now with a MEMS gravimeter. Since this measurement, the gravimeter has been miniaturized and tested in the field. Measurements of the free-air and Bouguer effects have been demonstrated by monitoring the change in gravitational acceleration measured while going up and down a lift shaft of 20.7 m, and up and down a local hill of 275 m. These tests demonstrate that the device has the potential to be a useful field-portable instrument. The development of an even smaller device is underway, with a total package size similar to that of a smartphone
Field tests of a portable MEMS gravimeter
Gravimeters are used to measure density anomalies under the ground. They are applied in
many different fields from volcanology to oil and gas exploration, but present commercial systems
are costly and massive. A new type of gravity sensor has been developed that utilises the same
fabrication methods as those used to make mobile phone accelerometers. In this study, we describe
the first results of a field-portable microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gravimeter. The stability
of the gravimeter is demonstrated through undertaking a multi-day measurement with a standard
deviation of 5.58 × 10−6 ms−2
. It is then demonstrated that a change in gravitational acceleration of
4.5 × 10−5 ms−2
can be measured as the device is moved between the top and the bottom of a 20.7 m
lift shaft with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 14.25. Finally, the device is demonstrated to be stable in
a more harsh environment: a 4.5 × 10−4 ms−2 gravity variation is measured between the top and
bottom of a 275-m hill with an SNR of 15.88. These initial field-tests are an important step towards
a chip-sized gravity senso
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