Indoor Location Services
Overview
We all love the GPS. The iPhone changes the game and now there are 10,000 apps that uses its GPS. Great, but as soon as you go indoor, you’re out of luck. Indoor positioning is not yet a big deal, mainly because it is very hard to design/develop, and very expensive (not that GPS wasn’t expensive to built back then by the US government…). It’s not wide spread because a place that wants it, has to pay for it! So most malls, stadiums don’t have the incentive to pay for it yet.
Hence research projects like these ones I did, to show the places what love they can possibly get with these toys.
- RFID Service
- MoteTrack
- [Future To-Do]
RFID Service
We are developing a network of RFID readers to be deployed throughout the MIT Media Lab buildings (2 of them). Right now, we have dozens of ThingMagic readers and hundreds of active RFID cards. I wrote a Python + Twisted program called superfid that will query each and every one of these readers (running software written by a teammate), figures out who’s nearby a specific reader (which is attached to a Samsung screen), and allows clients of all kinds including the screen app to query the list of people.
Twisted is an event-driven framework that is non-blocking — it took me a little while to get used to (vs. old-fashion threads), but me and my team (those who write clients) have been happy with its performance - it literally is fast, requires a small footprint, and hasn’t gone down at all whatsoever.
Some RFID pictures from ThingMagic.com:
MoteTrack
At Harvard we used a network of wireless sensors called “motes” to build an indoor positioning system.
[Future To-Do]
Bluetooth still uses much less energy than Wi-Fi and is a great alternative. My friends at Media Lab is building such BT network for location. I think a future to-do is to perhaps come up with a piece of “super” location hardware that talks multiple protocol, and we can instantly deploy them (i.e. “stick” them onto the walls and they just work together). Bonus point: the hardware can display visualization/status so we don’t have to log-on to some website to see what’s going on.
Note to self: is that hardware an iPhone?
