The Cricket Indoor Location System: An NMS Project @ MIT LCS

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The Cricket Indoor Location System

overview - cricket project description technology - how it works? results - how well cricket works? applications - what can you do with cricket? download - the software you need people - who are we? papers - cricket documents data - collection of some raw cricket data acknowledgments - who sponsors cricket?

Overview
Cricket is indoor location system for pervasive computing environments, such as those envisioned by MIT's Project Oxygen. These environments take advantage of emerging network-enabled devices and the promise of ubiquitous network connectivity. Note: This overview discusses Cricket v1. We have recently completed the design of Cricket v2, which is substantially more accurate than v1, has better energy consumption properties, has a new software stack based on TinyOS, has better support for continuous object tracking, and which will be commercially available in early 2004 (per current plan). We haven't had time to finish the documentation of Cricket v2 yet, but it will be available soon along with the software and hardware design. A compelling set of applications in pervasive environments are context-aware, being able to discover the external context in which they run and adapt accordingly. An important example of context is location , such as the position (in some coordinate system) of a device or user, the geographic space in which a device or user is (e.g., the room or portion of a room), and the orientation of a device within some coordinate system. Knowledge of location in the form of coordinate position, spatial resolution, and orientation (a.k.a. "directionality" or "heading") enables a wide variety of pervasive computing applications such as resource discovery, "point-and-use" interfaces, navigation, and augmented reality.

http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cricket/

27.05.2004 12:38:12

While location information in outdoor environments may be obtained via the Global Positioning System or using the cellular infrastructure (with the emerging E-911 services) augmented with a magnetic compass, such capabilities are unavailable in indoor environments or around tall buildings where line-of-sight to GPS satellites is usually unavailable. We assert that location-aware applications inside buildings, such as offices (and campuses), shopping malls, airports, homes, etc. has the potential to fundamentally change the way we interact with our immediate environment where computing elements will be "ubiquitous" or "pervasive".

Doonesbury, August 22 2001. Obtaining location information for applications in an indoor environment in an unobstrusive and private manner is a challenging task. Indoor environments are harsher than outdoor ones in their treatment of radio signals because of multipath effects and dead spots inside buildings. A traditional magnetic compass doesn't work well in many buildings with computers and monitors because of EM interference. User-privacy concerns are an important consideration in the successful deployment of these applications, especially if the users of the system are to extend beyond the researchers who develop the technology. The administration of the hardware and software infrastructure used for this must be minimal because of the large number (potentially over several thousand in a typical building) of devices and networked services that need this information.

Technology
Cricket uses a combination of RF and ultrasound technologies to provide a location-support service to users and applications. Wall- and ceiling-mounted beacons are spread through the building, publishing information on an RF signal operating in the 418 MHz AM band. With each RF advertisement, the beacon transmits a concurrent ultrasonic pulse. Listeners attached to devices and mobiles listen for RF signals, and upon receipt of the first few bits, listen for the corresponding ultrasonic pulse. When this pulse arrives, they obtain a distance estimate for the corresponding beacon. The listeners run maximum-likelihood estimators to correlate RF and ultrasound samples (the latter are simple pulses with no data encoded on them) and to pick the best one. Even in the presence of several competing beacons vying for attention, our goal is to accurately pinpoint the right one within a small number of seconds. The Cricket Compass provides position (x,y,z coordinate) information and orientation (the direction at which the device is pointing) information. This is what the Cricket v1 beacon (left) and listener (right) look like. (They're actually about the same size.)

This is Cricket v2 RS-232 (left) and Compact Flash edition (right).

Results
Cricket uses active beacons and passive listeners, which has two significant benefits. First, it is not a tracking system where a centralized controller or database receives transmissions from users and devices and tracks them. Second, it scales well as the number of devices increases; a system with active transmitters attached to devices wouldn't scale particularly well with the density of instrumented devices. Third, its decentralized architecture makes it easy to deploy. This does not mean it is hard to manage; a centralized front-end allows easy management and control. Cricket can estimate position to a few centimeters of accuracy and angles to within 3-5 degrees of the true value. It can determine which space a device is in by detecting boundaries to within about 2 feet. These combined capabilities are better than other available location systems that we know of. We've been deploying Cricket. Here's a picture of its deployment on the 5th floor of MIT's LCS at 200 Tech Square (click on it for a bigger image).

Applications
Stream-Migration Demo Video (18MB) An Oxygen Scenario (9MB) Indoor Navigation (27MB) BeaconFinder Stream Migration Viewfinder PeopleFinder CricketNav

Download
Cricket Setup Notes Cricket Software/Design Distribution The Cricket distribution is available for free. Please register your name, email, and affiliation to obtain the proper login and password to access the distribution.

Cricket people
Faculty: Hari Balakrishnan Seth Teller Erik Demaine

Research Staff Michel Goraczko Ken Steele Dorothy Curtis Graduate Students Bodhi Priyantha Roshan Baliga Allen Miu Kevin Wang Kyle Jamieson Undergraduate Students Adam Smith Mike Whitaker Former Students Anit Chakraborty (MEng) Albert Lin (UROP) Nikos Michalakis (MEng) Jorge Rafael Nogueras (SM)

Papers
Nissanka B. Priyantha, Anit Chakraborty, Hari Balakrishnan, The Cricket Location-Support system, Proc. 6th ACM MOBICOM, Boston, MA, August 2000. This is the original Cricket paper describing our first prototype and algorithms. Nissanka B. Priyantha, Allen Miu, Hari Balakrishnan, Seth Teller, The Cricket Compass for Context-Aware Mobile Applications, Proc. 7th ACM MOBICOM, Rome, Italy, July 2001. This paper describes how Cricket can be enhanced to provide orientation information, in addition to space and position coordinates. Seth Teller, Kevin Chen, Hari Balakrishnan, Pervasive Pose-Aware Applications and Infrastructure, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, May/June 2003. This paper describes early experience with some applications of the Cricket compass (done with two or more "standard" Crickets, rather than with an integrated compass device). This paper describes the lessons learned from Cricket v1 and how Cricket v2's design builds on these lessons. Nissanka B. Priyantha, Hari Balakrishnan, Erik Demaine, Seth Teller, Anchor-Free Distributed Localization in Sensor Networks, LCS Tech. Report #892. Seth Teller, Jiawen Chen, Hari Balakrishnan, Pervasive Pose-Aware Applications and Infrastructure, IEEE CG&A, July/August 2003.

Hari Balakrishnan, Roshan Baliga, Dorothy Curtis, Michel Goraczko, Allen Miu, Nissanka B. Priyantha, Adam Smith, Ken Steele, Seth Teller, Kevin Wang, Lessons from Developing and Deploying the Cricket Indoor Location System, November 2003. (Preprint.) Adam Smith, Hari Balakrishnan, Michel Goraczko, Nissanka Priyantha,Tracking Moving Devices with the Cricket Location System, June 2004.

Theses
Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha, Providing Precise Indoor Location Information to Mobile Devices SM Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 2001. [Postscript (1.21 MB)] (54 pages) Nikolaos Michalakis, Location-aware Access Control for Pervasive Computing Environments M. Eng. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 2003. [PS (749 KB)] [PDF (1.1 MB)] (73 pages) Allen K. L. Miu, Design and Implementation of an Indoor Mobile Navigation System SM Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jan 2002. [Postscript (3.8 MB)] [ps.gz (459 KB)] [PDF (1.9 MB)] (60 pages) Winner of a Masterworks Award, May 2002. Jorge Rafael Nogueras, A Stream Redirection Architecture for Pervasive Computing Environments SM Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2001. [PDF(577 KB)] (70 pages) Winner of a Masterworks Award, May 2001. Anit Chakraborty, A Distributed Architecture for Mobile, Location-Dependent Applications M. Eng. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2000. [PDF (656KB)] (58 pages)

Experimental Data
Cricket v1 Data Some experiments conducted using the original version of Cricket. Distance Measurements (zip file 180 kB) Positioning Measurements (zip file 900kB) See detailed experiment description in Design and Implementation of an Indoor Mobile Navigation System Cricket v2 Data Some experiments conducted using the second version of Cricket. Mobile Positioning Measurements (zip file 310 kB)

Acknowledgments
Cricket is funded by: NTT Inc. under the NTT-MIT research collaboration; Acer Inc., Delta Electronics Inc., HP Corp., NTT Inc., Nokia Research Center, and Philips Research under the MIT Project Oxygen partnership and the National Science Foundation support for The Scalable Location Aware Monitoring Project. We are grateful to these sponsors. Analog Devices, Inc., for their kind donation of electronic components and sensor devices.

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If you're looking for a tiny computer for robotics applications, please visit Crickets: Tiny Computers for Big Ideas, which is a project led by Fred Martin at the MIT Media Laboratory.