Researchers have developed various ground and aerial localization toolkits for surveillance and rescue tasks. Unlike most existing work focusing on self-positioning or localization initialized by positioning infrastructures, these toolkits target applications in which a third party responds to a request and conducts an on-demand task of localizing mobile targets without (or with) the help of existing infrastructures. The application domains include public safety, network forensics, and network management. The toolkits can cope with various complicated positioning environments including indoor and outdoor scenes from ground to air and cater to emerging cyber space crime scene investigations for law enforcement. The four third party localization toolkits include a mini helicopter-based aerial wireless kit, a handheld locator based on SmartPhones, a search and rescue robot and a three-dimensional localization and locking antennae toolkit. Localization via received signal strength (RSS) time series by a third party can be challenging due to the multipath effect and the lack of a large scale infrastructure. Researchers are able use the portability of their localization toolkits and make measurements at multiple locations to improve localization accuracy. These toolkits have the potential to fill an important gap in localization for scenes where no positioning infrastructure is available.
The ability to localize mobile targets without the help of existing positioning infrastructures is needed by a wide variety of search and rescue tasks performed by corporations, governments, and security agencies. Those tasks can be law enforcement searching for missing victims or criminals committing crimes via wireless networks, and various rescue teams including park rangers searching for lost travelers and hikers. Network managers can use these toolkits to pinpoint rogue access points, and malfunctioned mobile devices. Impacts of this project may also extend to academia and education. The market studies conducted in the project may enhance scientific and technological understanding of the localization problems with portable devices.
Our developed toolkits will fill an important gap in the state-of-the-art localization for scenes where no positioning infrastructure is available. Another salient feature distinguishing our third party localization techniques is that we have developed fundamental novel theories for supporting the design of these toolkits, improving localization accuracy and tuning the parameters in practical scenes. We have proposed an analytical methodology that considers the effect of target traffic pattern and specific hardware parameters on localization time and accuracy. We innovatively treat a packet sniffing process as a RSS sampling process and propose new sampling theories in localization. For localization via rotating antennas, we propose a novel rotating sampling theory to study the relationship between localization time, accuracy, target traffic pattern, antenna rotation speed, and RF (radio frequency) pattern. For localization via ground robots, hand-held devices and aerial vehicles, we have invented a novel space sampling theory for the first study of how movement speed of the locator and target traffic pattern affect localization accuracy. In the study of localizing moving targets, we have theories addressing the impact of target movement on localization time and accuracy, and how to lock on a target via rotating antennas and aerial vehicles for efficient tracking. We consider flight speed and target traffic pattern for the first study of localization time and accuracy for aerial vehicles flying a route based on a space-filling curve. The four prototypes of novel third party localization toolkits are: HAWK - a mini Helicopter-based Aerial Wireless Kit (demo video - http://youtu.be/ju86xnHbEq0), HaLo - handheld locator based on smartphones (demo video – http://youtu.be/S0vMe02-tZc), BotLoc - search and rescue robot (demo video - http://youtu.be/tN1U6k3WOH0), and 3DLoc2 - three dimensional localization and locking toolkit (demo video - http://youtu.be/EiLJoptgI28). Localization via RSS time series by a third party is challenging because of the multipath effect and the lack of a large scale infrastructure. We can take the advantage of portability of our localization toolkits, and make measurements at multiple locations to improve localization accuracy. These toolkits fill an important gap in the state of art localization for scenes where no positioning infrastructure is available. Please visit Center for Cyber Forensics of UMass Lowell (http://ccf.cs.uml.edu/) for more details. From our interviews, we now know: 1. HaLo is useful for search & rescue, and the market is huge. 2. HaLo is useful for law enforcement, and the market exists . 3. Military market is dominated by a few UAV companies. Instead of developing a UAV, we can develop localization components for UAVs as we did for HAWK localizing a wireless target. 4. Our technique cannot solve the pain of locating firefighters in a firefighting sciene. 5. There is no market for BotLoc and 3DLoc. 6. HAWK is not fast enough to locate buried victims.
