Extremis Innovation

First responders, a critical lifeline of any society, often find themselves in precarious situations. The ability to track them in real-time in unknown indoor environments, would significantly contribute to the success of their mission as well as their safety. Team Extremis Innovation presents the design, implementation and evaluation of TrackIO—a system capable of accurately localizing and tracking mobile responders in real time in large indoor environments. TrackIO leverages the mobile virtual infrastructure offered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), coupled with the balanced penetration-accuracy tradeoff offered by ultra-wideband (UWB), to accomplish this objective directly from the outside, without relying on access to any indoor infrastructure. Towards a practical system, TrackIO incorporates four novel mechanisms in its design that address key challenges to enable tracking responders (i) who are mobile with potentially non-uniform velocities (e.g. during turns), (ii) deep indoors with challenging reachability constraints, (iii) in real-time even for a large network, and (iv) with high accuracy even when impacted by UAV’s position error. TrackIO’s real-world performance reveals that it can track static nodes with a median accuracy of about 1–1.5 m and mobile (even running) nodes with a median accuracy of 2–2.5 m in large buildings in real-time. Indoor localization without any support from the building’s infrastructure is a challenging yet important problem. Particularly of importance to first responders, continuous real time tracking can be a life saver in many everyday situations. TrackIO uses a UAV to create the missing infrastructure outside the building and performs continuous ranging with indoor nodes. Through numerous algorithmic, architectural, and engineering modifications to trilateration and ranging protocols we obtain promising results localizing mobile indoor nodes accurate to about 2m from twenty meters outside the building. We believe TrackIO is a promising first step in active localization from outside the building. While TrackIO provides a fully working system where none exists today, we plan to continue to explore avenues to further improve accuracy, resilience, and redundancy in this competition.

Basics

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Description

First responders, a critical lifeline of any society, often find themselves in precarious situations. The ability to track them in real-time in unknown indoor environments, would significantly contribute to the success of their mission as well as their safety. Team Extremis Innovation presents the design, implementation and evaluation of TrackIO—a system capable of accurately localizing and tracking mobile responders in real time in large indoor environments. TrackIO leverages the mobile virtual infrastructure offered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), coupled with the balanced penetration-accuracy tradeoff offered by ultra-wideband (UWB), to accomplish this objective directly from the outside, without relying on access to any indoor infrastructure. Towards a practical system, TrackIO incorporates four novel mechanisms in its design that address key challenges to enable tracking responders (i) who are mobile with potentially non-uniform velocities (e.g. during turns), (ii) deep indoors with challenging reachability constraints, (iii) in real-time even for a large network, and (iv) with high accuracy even when impacted by UAV’s position error. TrackIO’s real-world performance reveals that it can track static nodes with a median accuracy of about 1–1.5 m and mobile (even running) nodes with a median accuracy of 2–2.5 m in large buildings in real-time.
Indoor localization without any support from the building’s infrastructure is a challenging yet important problem. Particularly of importance to first responders, continuous real time tracking can be a life saver in many everyday situations. TrackIO uses a UAV to create the missing infrastructure outside the building and performs continuous ranging with indoor nodes. Through numerous algorithmic, architectural, and engineering modifications to trilateration and ranging protocols we obtain promising results localizing mobile indoor nodes accurate to about 2m from twenty meters outside the building. We believe TrackIO is a promising first step in active localization from outside the building. While TrackIO provides a fully working system where none exists today, we plan to continue to explore avenues to further improve accuracy, resilience, and redundancy in this competition.