Precision Indoor/Outdoor Personnel Location Project

The overall goal of this project is to protect the lives of emergency responders and to enhance their ability to accomplish their missions through research and development of systems for personnel location and tracking, physiological status monitoring, and command and control.

News & Events

4^th Annual Workshop - August 3-5, 2009. Information and request to participate form

Background and Context

Precision Personnel Locator Overview Flyer

This project brings together diverse technical capabilities from other centers and laboratories at WPI to address important problems for emergency responders, the most critical of which is precise location knowledge for each person. The two primary centers involved in the current work are the Center for Advanced integrated Radio Navigation (CAIRN)and the Convergent Technology Center (CTC). CAIRN provides expertise in RF and software radio design, as well as extensive background in geolocation, while the Convergent Technology Center contributes expertise in advanced signal and image processing, information fusion, algorithm design, communication and computer networks.

Another important aspect of this work is that, as an academic enterprise, this project involves graduate students as research assistants, and undergraduate students as summer interns. The opportunity for research and development at the state of the art in communications, computation, and positioning, is an unparalleled experience for our students.

Current Work

Funded by the National Institute for Justice of the US Department of Justice, work on development of a prototype Precision Indoor/Outdoor Positioning System for use by firefighters, law enforcement, and corrections personnel is underway.

A new grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FEMA in cooperation with the U.S. Fire Administration, Fire Prevention and Safety Program for “Integrated Firefighter Locator and Physiological Monitoring” has been received. This new program integrates, for the first time, a unique 3-D location system and ‘wear and forget’ physiological stress monitoring system for the fire service. Results of this work can be seen on the "Integrated Firefighter Locator and Physiological Monitor" pages.

Detailed information is available through these pages.

Contact Information

Please feel free to contact any of the faculty listed on the People page. Following is the primary contact person for the PPL project:

Dr. R. James Duckworth
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 Institute Road
Worcester, MA 01609
+1-508-831-5204
rjduck@wpi.edu

Maintained by ppl@wpi.edu
Last modified: May 05, 2009, 09:04 EDT