Projects | NavigateIO

First responders, a critical lifeline of any society, often find themselves in precarious situations. The ability to track them real-time in unknown indoor environments, significantly contributes to the success of their mission as well as their safety. In this work, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of TrackIO – a novel system that is capable of accurately localizing and tracking mobile responders real-time in large indoor environments. NavigateIO leverages the ultra wide-band (UWB) technology, fusing it with inertial sensors to accomplish this objective directly from outside, without relying on access to any indoor infrastructure.

Towards a practical system, NavigateIO 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 challenged reachability,
• (iii) in real-time even for a large network, and
• (iv) with high accuracy.

NavigateIO’s real-world performance reveals that it can track static nodes with a median accuracy of about 1–1.5 m and mobile nodes with a median accuracy of 1.5-2m.

View our demo to the right.