Design of goods tracking system with mobile detectors

Abstract

Determining the physical location of indoor objects is a key issue in ubiquitous computing. Although there have been many proposals to provide physical location, these have had several restrictions such as dependence on the type and size of objects and trade-offs between location accuracy and the number of sensing devices. We propose an approach to removing these restrictions using mobile detectors. This paper describes the design of a goods tracking system called MobiTra that estimates the locations of any indoor objects using detection histories sent by mobile detectors. MobiTra is separated by several components and two data flows. A prototype for MobiTra was developed using an active RF system and Cricket, which can obtain a high degree of accuracy. We evaluated how accurately MobiTra estimated location in an environment that generated MTR errors. The errors affected the size of the estimated area and its position. We propose a new method of estimating location to be used in environments that generate MTR errors.