MobiLoc: Mobility Enhanced Localization

Prabal Dutta and Sarah Bergbreiter

Project Abstract

We propose to study the symbiotic relationship between mobility, navigation, and localization in the context of wireless sensor networks and mobile objects. We observe that mobility can aid in network node localization and that once localized, the network nodes can localize and track a mobile object (robot) and guide its navigation. Our motivation, and the ultimate goal of this work, is to realize the following scenario. A set of sensor networks nodes are dropped onto a field at unknown locations. A friendly (or unfriendly) mobile object travels through the sensor network in a structured (or random) walk. The network nodes determine their own locations by estimating the range to this mobile object in a coordinated fashion and applying a transform to these range estimates to yield the node positions in some global coordinate frame. Once localized, the nodes may multilaterate the location of the mobile object and guide its motion to locations and events of interest within the sensor network. We expect to complete only the mobility enhanced localization aspect of this project during Autumn 2003.

Links

SourceForge

Any source files, documents, data, etc. created during the course of this project will be stored in the TinyOS module on SourceForge. Assuming that you are using Windows, have downloaded and installed TinyOS 1.x (1.1 at the time of this document), have the other tools (e.g. Cygwin), and have installed TinyOS in the usual directory on your computer (c:\tinyos-1.x), you can get the most recent code and docs for MobiLoc by doing the following:
  1. Open a Cygwin window.
  2. Type (do not cd into the tinyos directory): 
    cd c:
  3. Type (to login to the SourceForge server): 
    cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos login
  4. When prompted for a password, just hit enter.
  5. Type (to download the files from the SourceForge server): 
    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos co tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc
  6. You should see something like the following scroll by on your screen: 
                cvs server: Updating tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc
            U tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc/readme.txt
            U tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc/schedule.txt
            cvs server: Updating tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc/apps
            cvs server: Updating tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc/doc
            cvs server: Updating tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc/tools
            cvs server: Updating tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc/tos
            ...
            ...
  7. Type: 
    cd tinyos-1.x/contrib/mobiloc
  8. Verify that you have the following directory structure (if you don't, you probably didn't checkout from the right directory): 
            /tinyos-1.x
            /contrib
                /mobiloc
                    readme.txt
                    ...
                    /apps
                    /doc
                    /tools
                    /tos
  9. Read the readme.txt file for the most recent information about this project.