Experiences with Cricket/Ultrasound Technology for 3-Dimensional Locationing within an Indoor Smart Environment

Cricket ultrasound locationing devices are employed to support SmartSpaces, a ubiquitous smart computing research environment at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. A key requirement for realization of the SmartSpaces vision is a robust (interior) location-reporting system. This paper discusses some early CMU Silicon Valley experiments with Crickets within the context of the SmartSpaces project with an interior setting. Cricket hardware strengths and weaknesses are evaluated and reported in the context of controlling a Roomba robot vacuum. Experiences using Crickets to guide Roomba navigation are discussed.