Project54 is mainly comprised of graduate students completing their theses in a variety of fields from mapping applications to speech interaction. Undergraduates here at the University of New Hampshire can be exposed to research as well. One of research opportunities presented to undergraduates is the Student Research Undergraduate Fellowship grant. This grant allows students to submit a research proposal and if selected, work on it for ten weeks over the summer. Project54 undergrads Matthew Lape and I, under the direction of Project54 Director and UNH ECE Professor Andrew Kun, just submitted our proposal called KLAS: The Kingsbury Location Awareness System.

This is a proposed prototype for a location based digital assistant for academic buildings at the University of New Hampshire Durham campus. KLAS will contain two main components, the location awareness system and the user-interactive software. The location awareness system will be comprised of a sensor network of IEEE 802.11 access points and passive RFID tags. The 802.11 access points will be used for a general region location detector (e.g. half a hallway) and the RFID passive tags will be used for specific positioning (e.g. office and classroom doors). The user-interactive software, which will be developed using the Project54 PDA Software Framework, will contain two main facets, a dynamic tour guide and an indoor mapping application. The user will be able to use a PDA with this KLAS software on the 2^nd floor of Kingsbury Hall (the main engineering building at the UNH Durham Campus).

The following video is a proof of concept of the KLAS indoor mapping application. It depicts a user using the indoor mapping application and through audio interaction, getting from an ECE lab in Kingsbury Hall to the ECE Office.

Mark Taipan

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed