Author: Rob Matheson | MIT News Office<\/p>\n
A new system developed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere helps networks of smart devices cooperate to find their positions in environments where GPS usually fails.<\/p>\n
Today, the \u201cinternet of things\u201d concept is fairly well-known: Billions of interconnected sensors around the world \u2014 embedded in everyday objects, equipment, and vehicles, or worn by humans or animals \u2014 collect and share data for a range of applications.<\/p>\n
An emerging concept, the \u201clocalization of things,\u201d enables those devices to sense and communicate their position. This capability could be helpful in supply chain monitoring, autonomous navigation, highly connected smart cities, and even forming a real-time \u201cliving map\u201d of the world. Experts project that the localization-of-things market will grow to $128 billion by 2027.<\/p>\n
The concept hinges on precise localization techniques. Traditional methods leverage GPS satellites or wireless signals shared between devices to establish their relative distances and positions from each other. But there\u2019s a snag: Accuracy suffers greatly in places with reflective surfaces, obstructions, or other interfering signals, such as inside buildings, in underground tunnels, or in \u201curban canyons\u201d where tall buildings flank both sides of a street.<\/p>\n
Researchers from MIT, the University of Ferrara, the Basque Center of Applied Mathematics (BCAM), and the University of Southern California have developed a system that captures location information even in these noisy, GPS-denied areas. A paper describing the system appears in the Proceedings of the IEEE<\/em>.<\/p>\n When devices in a network, called \u201cnodes,\u201d communicate wirelessly in a signal-obstructing, or \u201charsh,\u201d environment, the system fuses various types of positional information from dodgy wireless signals exchanged between the nodes, as well as digital maps and inertial data. In doing so, each node considers information associated with all possible locations \u2014 called \u201csoft information\u201d \u2014 in relation to those of all other nodes. The system leverages machine-learning techniques and techniques that reduce the dimensions of processed data to determine possible positions from measurements and contextual data. Using that information, it then pinpoints the node\u2019s position.<\/p>\n In simulations of harsh scenarios, the system operates significantly better than traditional methods. Notably, it consistently performed near the theoretical limit for localization accuracy. Moreover, as the wireless environment got increasingly worse, traditional systems\u2019 accuracy dipped dramatically while the new soft information-based system held steady.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the tough gets tougher, our system keeps localization accurate,\u201d says Moe Win, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and head of the Wireless Information and Network\u00a0Sciences Laboratory. \u201cIn harsh wireless environments, you have reflections and echoes that make it far more difficult to get accurate location information. Places like the Stata Center [on the MIT campus] are particularly challenging, because there are surfaces reflecting signals everywhere. Our soft information method is particularly robust in such harsh wireless environments.\u201d<\/p>\n Joining Win on the paper are: Andrea Conti of the University of Ferrara; Santiago Mazuelas of BCAM; Stefania Bartoletti of the University of Ferrara; and William C. Lindsey of the University of Southern California.<\/p>\n Capturing \u201csoft information\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n In network localization, nodes are generally referred to as anchors or agents. Anchors are nodes with known positions, such as GPS satellites or wireless base stations. Agents are nodes that have unknown positions \u2014 such as autonomous cars, smartphones, or wearables.<\/p>\n To localize, agents can use anchors as reference points, or they can share information with other agents to orient themselves. That involves transmitting wireless signals, which arrive at the receiver carrying positional information. The power, angle, and time-of-arrival of the received waveform, for instance, correlate to the distance and orientation between nodes.<\/p>\n Traditional localization methods extract one feature of the signal to estimate a single value for, say, the distance or angle between two nodes. Localization accuracy relies entirely on the accuracy of those inflexible (or \u201chard\u201d) values, and accuracy has been shown to decrease drastically as environments get harsher.<\/p>\n Say a node transmits a signal to another node that\u2019s 10 meters away in a building with many reflective surfaces. The signal may bounce around and reach the receiving node at a time corresponding to 13 meters away. Traditional methods would likely assign that incorrect distance as a value.<\/p>\n For the new work, the researchers decided to try using soft information for localization. The method leverages many signal features and contextual information to create a probability distribution of all possible distances, angles, and other metrics. \u201cIt\u2019s called \u2018soft information\u2019 because we don\u2019t make any hard choices about the values,\u201d Conti says.<\/p>\n The system takes many sample measurements of signal features, including its power, angle, and time of flight. Contextual data come from external sources, such as digital maps and models that capture and predict how the node moves.<\/p>\n Back to the previous example: Based on the initial measurement of the signal\u2019s time of arrival, the system still assigns a high probability that the nodes are 13 meters apart. But it assigns a small possibility that they\u2019re 10 meters apart, based on some delay or power loss of the signal. As the system fuses all other information from surrounding nodes, it updates the likelihood for each possible value. For instance, it could ping a map and see that the room\u2019s layout shows it\u2019s highly unlikely both nodes are 13 meters apart. Combining all the updated information, it decides the node is far more likely to be in the position that is 10 meters away.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the end, keeping that low-probability value matters,\u201d Win says. \u201cInstead of giving a definite value, I\u2019m telling you I\u2019m really confident that you\u2019re 13 meters away, but there\u2019s a smaller possibility you\u2019re also closer. This gives additional information that benefits significantly in determining the positions of the nodes.\u201d<\/p>\n Reducing complexity<\/strong><\/p>\n Extracting many features from signals, however, leads to data with large dimensions that can be too complex and inefficient for the system. To improve efficiency, the researchers reduced all signal data into a reduced-dimension and easily computable space.<\/p>\n To do so, they identified aspects of the received waveforms that are the most and least useful for pinpointing location based on \u201cprincipal component analysis,\u201d a technique that keeps the most useful aspects in multidimensional datasets and discards the rest, creating a dataset with reduced dimensions. If received waveforms contain 100 sample measurements each, the technique might reduce that number to, say, eight.<\/p>\n A final innovation was using machine-learning techniques to learn a statistical model describing possible positions from measurements and contextual data. That model runs in the background to measure how that signal-bouncing may affect measurements, helping to further refine the system\u2019s accuracy.<\/p>\n The researchers are now designing ways to use less computation power to work with resource-strapped nodes that can\u2019t transmit or compute all necessary information. They\u2019re also working on bringing the system to \u201cdevice-free\u201d localization, where some of the nodes can\u2019t or won\u2019t share information. This will use information about how the signals are backscattered off these nodes, so other nodes know they exist and where they are located.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"