Search

Accurate localization in underground coal mining is a challenging technology in coal mine safety production. This paper proposes a low-cost battery-free localization scheme based on depth images, called MineBL. The main idea is to utilize the battery-free low-cost reflective balls as position nodes and realize underground target localization with a series of algorithms. In particular, the paper designs a data enhancement strategy based on small-target reorganization to increase the identification accuracy of tiny position nodes. Moreover, a novel ranging algorithm based on multi-filter cooperative denoising has been proposed, and an optimized weighted centroid location algorithm based on multilateral location errors has been designed to minimize underground localization errors. Many experiments in the indoor laboratories and the underground coal mine laboratories have been conducted, and the experimental results have verified that MineBL has good localization performances, with localization errors less than 30 cm in 95% of cases. Therefore, MineBL has great potential to provide a low-cost and effective solution for precise target localization in complex underground environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is currently the biggest threat that challenges all of humankind's health and property. One promising and effective way to control the rapid spreading of this infection is searching for primary close contacts of the confirmed cases. In response, we propose COVID-19 Tracer, a low-cost passive searching system to find COVID-19 patients' close contacts. The main idea is utilizing ubiquitous WiFi probe requests to describe the location similarity, which is then achieved by two designed range-free judgment indicators: location similarity coefficient and close contact distance. We have carried out extensive experiments in a school office building, and the experimental results show an average accuracy of more than 98%, demonstrating our system's effectiveness in judging close contacts. Last but not least, we have developed a prototype system for a school building to find potential close contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indoor localization provides robust solutions in many applications, and Wi-Fi-based methods are considered some of the most promising means for optimizing indoor fingerprinting localization accuracy. However, Wi-Fi signals are vulnerable to environmental variations, resulting in data across different times being subjected to different distributions. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an across-time indoor localization solution based on channel state information (CSI) fingerprinting via multi-domain representations and transfer component analysis (TCA). We represent the format of CSI readings in multiple domains, extending the characterization of fine-grained information. TCA, a domain adaptation method in transfer learning, is applied to shorten the distribution distances among several CSI readings, which overcomes various CSI distribution problems at different time periods. Finally, we present a modified Bayesian model averaging approach to integrate the multi-domain outcomes and give the estimated positions. We conducted test-bed experiments in three scenarios on both personal computer (PC) and smartphone platforms in which the source and target fingerprinting data were collected across different days. The experimental results showed that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in localization accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clock synchronization is still a vital and challenging task for underground coal wireless internet of things (IoT) due to the uncertainty of underground environment and unreliability of communication links. Instead of considering on-demand driven clock synchronization, this paper proposes a novel Adaptive Robust Synchronization (ARS) scheme with packets loss for mine wireless environment. A clock synchronization framework that is based on Kalman filtering is first proposed, which can adaptively adjust the sampling period of each clock and reduce the communication overhead in single-hop networks. The proposed scheme also solves the problem of outliers in data packets with time-stamps. In addition, this paper extends the ARS algorithm to multi-hop networks. Additionally, the upper and lower bounds of error covariance expectation are analyzed in the case of incomplete measurement. Extensive simulations are conducted in order to evaluate the performance. In the simulation environment, the clock accuracy of ARS algorithm is improved by 7.85% when compared with previous studies for single-hop networks. For multi-hop networks, the proposed scheme improves the accuracy by 12.56%. The results show that the proposed algorithm has high scalability, robustness, and accuracy, and can quickly adapt to different clock accuracy requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convenient indoor positioning has become an urgent need due to the improvement it offers to quality of life, which inspires researchers to focus on device-free indoor location. In areas covered with Wi-Fi, people in different locations will to varying degrees have an impact on the transmission of channel state information (CSI) of Wi-Fi signals. Because space is divided into several small regions, the idea of classification is used to locate. Therefore, a novel localization algorithm is put forward in this paper based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and a multi-model integration strategy. The approach consists of three stages. First, the local outlier factor (LOF), the anomaly detection algorithm, is used to correct the abnormal data. Second, in the training phase, 3 DNN models are trained to classify the region fingerprints by taking advantage of the processed CSI data from 3 antennas. Third, in the testing phase, a model fusion method named group method of data handling (GMDH) is adopted to integrate 3 predicted results of multiple models and give the final position result. The test-bed experiment was conducted in an empty corridor, and final positioning accuracy reached at least 97%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underground personnel localization is highly important in the operations of coal mines. Considering the special underground environment, this paper introduces a novel localization scheme based on step detection and image recognition technologies, which makes use of unique characteristics of the underground environment like the dark environment and the miner's lamp. Since the underground topology is relatively simple, the miner can be located only by step information. However, the localization with step information always causes the problem of cumulative error. To solve this problem, we rebuild a special base station with a camera in a dark underground environment. A miner's lamp, which every miner carries, can simply transform to irradiate unique shapes (such as triangles, rectangles, and circles) and every coal miner at the base station can identify these shapes based on image recognition technologies. Thus, we can obtain the miner's precise position when he/she is passing by a base station. In that way, we can correct the localization results to solve cumulative error. We implemented our algorithm in indoor and underground environments. The experimental results show that 96% of spatial errors were 2.5 m or less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]