As the name suggests, the purpose of this project is to develop a positioning system capable of tracking different people or objects in a given confined area, for example football field, warehouse, building and so on. The possible applications of this device are tracking each football player in a field, monitoring prisoners’ location in a jail or even locating a specific product in a warehouse. Current positioning systems are highly complex or provide just a run of the mill level of resolution.

The group’s aim is to have multiple remote targets being tracked by a collection of sensors connected to a base station, up to a high degree of accuracy without the hassle of manual labour and reduced level of complexity.

It is our goal to develop multiple targets capable of transmitting Radio Frequency (RF) signals and several RF receivers to detect the location of these multiple transmitters using position location technique suitable for wireless communication systems. The RF signal projected by a single transmitter will be captured by these receivers. Due to the different receiving points, the phase of the signal collected at the receivers will vary. Each phase reading at different receiver stations will be collected and processed at the base station, and compared to the results from neighbouring receivers to determine the location of the desired object. The case of multiple targets will be an extension to this scheme with each object being tracked capable of transmitting a unique self-identifying signal.

Professor Rod Tucker, Dr Jamie Evans, Rocky Hin, Andreas Johan, Kean Siang Khoo