Establishing a relative positioning system to achieve mobile localization

There are an increasing number of situations in which the location of some digital device is known, but the methods to communicate with it are unknown. These situations can frustrate users and lead to the non-adoption to new, beneficial technologies. To combat this, I propose a relative positioning system between digital devices in order for each device to learn the relative locations of nearby devices. I explore three separate methods of establishing this positioning system. The first uses ultrasonic range-finding to localize nearby devices. The second uses WiFi range finding between mobile devices and stationary WiFi access points. The final method uses machine vision to jointly localize two devices observing the same scene from different angle. Ultimately none of these methods were fully implemented, but an analysis is given for the advantages and disadvantages of using these methods.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Copeland, Brian W

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Chris Schmandt.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117300

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/117300