Experimental Evaluation of an Angle Based Indoor Localization System

In this paper, we present an experimental prototype of an indoor localization system that uses angle estimation and decentralized computations. The system uses three rotating optical beacon signal generators that are built using commonly available off-the-shelf components. Wireless sensor nodes equipped with photo sensors determine their locations from the estimated angular separations between the optical sources. No additional hardware is required at the sensor nodes. The system also does not involve any centralized server or off-line measurements, which are key requirements of RF-based localization systems. We present the design principles, possible sources of error, and the lessons learnt from building the experimental localization system. Performance results obtained from laboratory experiments are presented. The proposed system provides location estimates that are accurate within a few inches in indoor applications. In addition, the idea may be extended to large scale outdoor sensor systems where it may not be economically or physically viable to use additional localization hardware such as GPS.

[1]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  A beacon navigation method for autonomous vehicles , 1989 .

[2]  Hari Balakrishnan,et al.  6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MOBICOM ’00) The Cricket Location-Support System , 2022 .

[3]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  GPS-less low-cost outdoor localization for very small devices , 2000, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[4]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[5]  Mani B. Srivastava,et al.  Dynamic fine-grained localization in Ad-Hoc networks of sensors , 2001, MobiCom '01.

[6]  Gaetano Borriello,et al.  Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing , 2001, Computer.

[7]  B. R. Badrinath,et al.  Ad hoc positioning system (APS) , 2001, GLOBECOM'01. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Cat. No.01CH37270).

[8]  L. El Ghaoui,et al.  Convex position estimation in wireless sensor networks , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[9]  B. Warneke,et al.  Smart dust mote forerunners , 2001, Technical Digest. MEMS 2001. 14th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (Cat. No.01CH37090).

[10]  Miodrag Potkonjak,et al.  Coverage problems in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[11]  Kai Li,et al.  A directionality based location discovery scheme for wireless sensor networks , 2002, WSNA '02.

[12]  Ivan Stojmenovic,et al.  Position-based routing in ad hoc networks , 2002, IEEE Commun. Mag..

[13]  Andy Hopper,et al.  The Anatomy of a Context-Aware Application , 2002, Wirel. Networks.

[14]  Tarek F. Abdelzaher,et al.  Range-free localization schemes for large scale sensor networks , 2003, MobiCom '03.

[15]  Leonidas J. Guibas,et al.  Wireless sensor networks - an information processing approach , 2004, The Morgan Kaufmann series in networking.

[16]  B. R. Badrinath,et al.  VOR base stations for indoor 802.11 positioning , 2004, MobiCom '04.

[17]  Tian He,et al.  A high-accuracy, low-cost localization system for wireless sensor networks , 2005, SenSys '05.

[18]  Matt Welsh,et al.  MoteTrack: A Robust, Decentralized Approach to RF-Based Location Tracking , 2005, LoCA.