Indoor positioning

Problem
Gaining information about your position outdoors is relatively easy now with commerically available Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and software. This project is intended to investigate positioning indoors. You should become familiar with some indoor positioning systems, the most popular of which is the Active Badge system developed at Olivetti Research Labs in Cambridge, England. There are many interesting mobile applications that are possible when there is the ability to track and locate one or more people over a large space.

The purpose of this project is to become familiar with an indoor tracking system developed here at Georgia Tech by Mike Sinclair and the Interactive Media Technology Center (IMTC) in the GCATT building. The FCE group has a version of this system and we want to set it up somewhere to begin doing location-aware computing projects beyond our initial efforts in Cyberguide and Cyberdesk. A number of students have worked with this system, but we have not yet put it into everyday use. We have contacts with Mike Sinclair who can help you to understand how the system works.

Background

• Look into issues on location-aware and context-aware computing in the FCE projects Cyberguide and Cyberdesk
• Locate an article on the Olivetti Active Badge system.
• A former undergraduate built a front-end to the positioning system. The results of his work can be found here.

• Become familiar with the indoor positioning system, currently located in Irfan Essa's Computational Perception Lab on the third floor of the College of Computing.
• Install and use the positioning system front-end developed by former FCE students.
• Write a report on how this system compares with the Active Badge system.