Finding Your Way with KLAS: The Development of an Indoor Location Awareness System
—Matthew Lape and Mark Taipan (Edited by Jennifer Lee and Kristin Brodeur)
We can tell you countless stories of getting lost in Kingsbury Hall, the newly renovated engineering building at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. Sure, there are signs on each of the doors and small maps at the stairwells but for a new visitor, finding a specific room can be daunting. One way to get acclimated to the building is to take a guided tour. If a prospective student is interested in a specific major, he or she can contact a department to schedule an appointment with a professor. Depending on the time of the year, the process of finding a time that works with both parties can be a laborious process. What if the prospective student wants to learn about other engineering departments in Kingsbury Hall? Few faculty and students know the details about each lab facility, faculty member, and course. Through our own experiences and those of other visitors to Kingsbury Hall, we have identified two main problems.
The authors (Matthew, left, and Mark, right) navigating Kingsbury Hall with KLAS
The first is that using the signs on the doors and the sparse maps by the stairwells is an inefficient form of navigation in Kingsbury Hall. The second problem is that giving knowledgeable guided tours requires human resources that not all UNH engineering departments have. A location-aware digital assistant, a handheld device that knows where its user is, can solve both these problems. The user can get to a location by following navigation instructions on a small screen. The device could also act as a tour guide by providing information about nearby rooms.
Developing the Research Project
Location–aware digital assistants have become increasingly popular in today’s technologically advanced world, especially in the field of navigation. Many late model cars come standard with a built–in navigational system, which uses the Global Positioning System, or GPS. These navigation devices allow the driver to type in the address of the destination and then receive turn–by–turn directions while driving. Location–aware digital assistants are not limited to navigation devices either; they can also be digital tour guides. An example of this is at the Marble Museum of Carrara in Italy. Visitors carry personal data assistants (PDAs) which show information relevant to the exhibit they are near.
The success of these location–aware devices has shown that if they were implemented at UNH, the community would benefit. However, building a system like this requires knowledge of electromagnetic theory, network hardware, and software development. This broad spectrum of knowledge suited our two different majors. As an electrical engineer, Matt has a fundamental understanding of electrical hardware design and electromagnetic theory. Being a computer engineer, Mark has experience with computer networks and software development. Together, we had a perfect blend of skills; and, since we had already worked together for two years at CATLab, an Electrical and Computer Engineering UNH research lab, it was natural to cooperatively pursue this project.
This idea quickly turned into a reality during the summer of 2008. We successfully applied for a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) from UNH to develop a prototype indoor location system called the Kingsbury Location Awareness System, or KLAS. The system was built for the second floor of Kingsbury Hall, the home of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences (CEPS). We chose it because we have all our engineering classes there and are familiar with the building (and its problems). We chose to deal with just the second floor for two reasons. First, we did not want to over–complicate this prototype system. Second, the floor has several IEEE 802.11 Access Points pre–installed by UNH’s Computer Information Services (CIS). These stationary devices provide wireless internet to the UNH community, and CIS has installed several of them in all academic buildings. Using these existing access points would allow KLAS eventually to be expanded throughout the campus without additional costly hardware installation or extensive coding.
KLAS can determine the user’s location by the signal strengths from the user’s handheld PDA to these installed access points, coupled with a location algorithm. The location system compares the signal strengths of these access points to a previously established master list of possible locations, and chooses a location based on the entry that matches best. As the user travels around the floor, the strengths of the wireless signals are constantly reassessed to determine the location. (Click here to learn more about the KLAS infrastructure and how KLAS determines where the user is located.)
Once the user’s location is determined, KLAS feeds the location information to one of two KLAS applications: the Tour Guide or the Navigator. These are the software applications that users will interact with. The Tour Guide, using the user’s current location, provides information about nearby rooms. The picture shows an example of what the user will see on the PDA when using the Tour Guide application.
The other application the user can interact with is the Navigator. This application provides the user with directions to a room. The user first selects a destination from a list of the rooms on the second floor of Kingsbury Hall. The KLAS software will then show a map of where the user is currently, and where he or she needs to go to reach the destination. The map will then update with new directions as the user moves on the shown path. (Click here to see a video of a student using the Navigator to go from the CEPS Dean’s office to Professor Andrew Kun’s office.)
Future Development
Even though the SURF project has been completed, our excitement fueled us to continue working on KLAS. In particular, we want to improve the system’s ability to adapt to its environment, such as humidity and number of people in the hallway, which currently adversely affect its location accuracy. However, accuracy would be useless if the user interface on the screen were difficult to follow. Therefore, we plan to experiment with different navigation interfaces to see which one results in the user going most quickly and easily to the desired destination. The picture shows three possible interfaces that utilize different methods of providing directions.The information from our experiment will allow us to create an easy to use, efficient and effective user interface for our Navigator application.
The SURF grant opened an enormous opportunity for both of us that normally would not be offered through the traditional Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate career. While we have enjoyed the classes and have learned a tremendous amount from them, the time spent on our SURF project has been one of the most satisfying and rewarding experiences of our lives. Not only have we both improved our technical skills dramatically, we also were able to use technology to give back to the UNH community. Our hope is that the groundwork we have laid will help make a similar system available in not just Kingsbury Hall, but in all the academic buildings on the UNH campus.
We would like to extend our gratitude to the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research and donors, our advisor Professor Andrew Kun, Research Engineer Oskar Palinko, CATLab, our families, and to the faculty and staff in both the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Computer Science Department for giving us an overwhelming amount of support, advice, time, and lessons that will stay with us throughout our engineering careers.
