A relative positioning system for co-located mobile devices

Abstract

If a mobile computing device knows how it is positioned and oriented in relation to other devices nearby, then it can provide enhanced support for multi-device and multi-user interactions. Existing systems that provide position information to mobile computers are reliant on externally deployed infrastructure, such as beacons or sensors in the environment. We introduce the Relate system, which provides fine-grained relative position information to co-located devices on the basis of peer-topeer sensing, thus overcoming dependence on any external infrastructure. The system is realised as a hardware/software plug-in, using ultrasound for peer-to-peer sensing, USB to interface with standard mobile devices, and data abstraction and inferencing to map sensor data to a spatial model that maintains both quantitative and qualitative relationships. We present a set of services and applications to demonstrate the utility of the system. We report experimental results on the accuracy of the relative position and orientation estimates, and other aspects of system performance.

Using Spatial Abstractions in Industrial Environments

“…In order to acquire the position and direction context of artefacts, we used the highprecision Intersense IS-900 3 ultrasonic tracking for the scenarios presented in Section 5, but also experimented with the Ekahau Wi-Fi tags 4 and the Intersense Wireless Intertiacube 3 3 sensor which can easily be integrated in the framework. Moreover, also relative sensors such as the ultrasonic peer-to-peer sensor for measuring distance and orientation to other such sensors presented in [5] could be used. An overview of the architecture, which consists of six services described in the next subsection, is shown in Figure 4 …”

“…Generally speaking, abstracting context information is about separating from details which are not relevant for a certain application [2]. For example, abstractions of locations using highlevel information like rooms and buildings instead of geographical coordinates [4], or relations between locations which are represented with semantically meaningful names such as left or far [5], have been used by researchers with the aim to provide spatial information in a sensor-independent and more natural way that is closer to human concepts of space.…”

“…We have developed a corresponding service-oriented middleware which facilitates the exploitation of spatial abstractions, and demonstrate its functionality, technical feasibility and flexibility on behalf of four industrial application scenarios. The works closest to ours are the Relate System [5] and the Cooperative Artefacts [8] concept, which both utilize spatial relations for the interaction between mobile devices. However, our work is distinct with regard to (i) the consideration of explicitly defined spatial areas, (ii) the recognition of spatial relations therefrom and their flexible, domain-specific abstractions, and (iii) the proposed concept for reasoning about recognized relations over time using logical rules.…”

Collaborative business items

“…The wireless communication interface of sensor nodes often provides a notion of proximity. This can be further refined through technologies like ultrasound [4] or infrared [7]. Other key technologies for enabling collaboration focus on the description and runtime implementation of business logic, which are encoded as rules.…”

Multimodal localisation : analysis, algorithms and experimental evaluation

“…one can choose the required technology for a specific application. Most commonly used technologies are infrared-based [186,107], ultrasonic-based [160,26,82], acoustic-based [70], electromagnetic-based [16], inertialbased [199], optical-based [52], and radio frequency-based systems [157,32]. Other technologies like using powerlines available at home are presented in [153].…”