News and Notes for Our Industrial Partners
June, 2008
STUDENTS
Undergraduate Research Project
Virginia Tech students Jerry Towler and Bryan Farley, with graduate Assistants Haris Volos (measurement assistance) and Tao Jia (algorithm assistance), are working with Dr. Buehrer on his currently funded project on position location. The project title is “Position Location in GPS-Challenged Environments: Improving Localization Indoors.” Position location is vital in many applications including military reconnaissance, sensor networks, mobile robots, wildlife monitoring, and many others. GPS is the primary source of position location information with accuracy as good as 3-5m in environments with an open view of the skies. However, in many environments (e.g., indoors) the performance of GPS can be severely degraded due to (a) the obstructed view of the sky which limits the number of satellites available and (b) propagation effects such as attenuation and multipath fading. This work seeks methods which improve the performance of GPS-based position location indoors when other information (WiFi signals, accelerometers, possibly links to other GPS-enabled devices) is available. This project builds on recent work for indoor position location which mitigates multipath propagation effects (resources include the dissertation and recent publications of Swaroop Venkatesh) as well as two previous undergraduate research projects.
Specific tasks to be performed include:
- Understanding GPS and position location
- Characterizing GPS performance in open and indoor environments
- Characterizing WiFi propagation (signal strength)
- Evaluating, ordering and characterizing accelerometer performance
- Developing, simulating and analyzing techniques for exploiting additional information (including WiFi signal strength measurements, accelerometer data, range data between multiple devices, etc.) for improving position location in indoor environments.