Michael Boyer
Union College
Subject Listing - Engineering
Advisor: Dr. Spinelli John
Saturday, Oral Session 7, Presentation 4, Karpen Hall 006
AUTOMATED CAMPUS TOUR GUIDE
An automated campus tour guide system is designed to provide a user with a continually updated visual representation of his or her current location, directions from that location to a specific location chosen by the user, and contextual information about nearby buildings and landmarks. The system can either be used to freely wander the campus or to follow a pre-defined tour similar to that provided by a human tour guide. For portability, the system is designed for use on a handheld computer. For testing purposes, the system is implemented specifically for the Union College campus; however, it is intentionally designed with enough flexibility to be used at other college campuses or similar locations with minimal modification. The main technological challenge of the design is determining the user's location in real-time, in three-dimensions, and both indoors and outdoors. To accomplish this, a combination of GPS and GSM localization technology is used. GPS is designed to provide accurate outdoor localization around the world. GSM, on the other hand, is a cellular communication standard designed for voice and data transmission and not for localization. Recent research, however, has shown that accurate GSM localization can be accomplished through a training process known as fingerprinting, in which the area of interest is divided up into a grid of cells approximately one to two meters on a side. In every cell, the signal strength of each nearby GSM tower is measured; the set of all of these readings constitutes the training set. In order to later determine a user's location, the same signal strength readings are taken and compared to the training set to estimate the most likely current location. By combining GPS and GSM localization, the system provides maximum coverage with minimal training.
Advisor: Dr. Spinelli John, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Union College, Schenectady, NY