First responders, a critical lifeline of any society, often find themselves in precarious situations. The ability to track them real-time in un-known indoor environments, significantly contributes to the success of their mission as well as their safety. In this project, we design and build TrackIO – a novel system that is capable of accurately localizing and tracking mobile responders real-time in large indoor environments. TrackIO leverages the mobile virtual infrastructure offered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), coupled with the balanced penetration-accuracy tradeoff offered by ultra-wideband (UWB), to accomplish this objective directly from outside, without relying on access to any indoor infrastructure.

Towards a practical system, TrackIO 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 even when impacted by UAV’s position error. TrackIO’s real-world performance reveals that it can track static nodes with a median accuracy of about 1–1.5m and mobile (even running) nodes with a median accuracy of 2–2.5m in large buildings in real-time.

A demo of TrackIO is available below:

• "TrackIO: Tracking First Responders Inside Out", A. Dhekne, A. Chakraborty, K. Sundaresan, S. Rangarajan, USENIX International Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Feb 2019.