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A networked mobile sensor test-bed for collaborative multi-target tracking applications

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Abstract

This paper presents the design, architecture, implementation, and experimental results from a networked mobile sensor test-bed developed for collaborative sensor tracking applications. The test-bed comprises a fleet of networked mobile sensors, an indoor localization system, a control, debugging and management infrastructure, and a tiered wireless ad hoc network for seamless integration of the above three components and the existing wireless infrastructure. First, the software and hardware architectural details of a swarm capable autonomous vehicle (SCAV) system for our collaborative applications are presented. Second, the details of an indoor self-localization and Kalman filter based navigation system design for the SCAV platform are presented. Third, as an example multi-sensor application, a collaborative multi-target tracking problem and a heuristics-based networked solution are formulated. Finally, the performance of the collaborative tracking framework is evaluated on the laboratory test-bed for characterizing the impacts of localization and navigation errors on the distributed tracking performance. The experimental study also characterizes the tradeoff between the tracking performance and the consumed wireless bandwidth. The experimental results demonstrate a number of counterintuitive results due to various errors in sensor localization and navigation.

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Notes

  1. If all location beacons are placed at the same height, the z-coordinate cancels out from the equations.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by grants from National Science Foundation (CMMI-0800103), Air Force Research Laboratory, and Michigan State University’s High Assurance Computing Initiative.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Subir Biswas, Sonny Gupta, Fan Yu & Tao Wu

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  1. Subir Biswas
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  2. Sonny Gupta
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  3. Fan Yu
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  4. Tao Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Subir Biswas.

Additional information

Sonny Gupta was with the Networked Embedded and Wireless Systems (NeEWS) laboratory at MSU during this work.

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Biswas, S., Gupta, S., Yu, F. et al. A networked mobile sensor test-bed for collaborative multi-target tracking applications. Wireless Netw 16, 1329–1344 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-009-0206-x

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