Project CLEO

The goal of project CLEO is to develop devices and services to encourage and enable participatory sensing and citizen scientists. A core technology developed in the project is to make location sensing energy efficient, so devices can be small and light, sample more frequently, and of low cost. The approach is called Cloud-Offloaded GPS (or CO-GPS).

News:

• Mobile Location Sensing Tutorial at ACM MobiSys 2013, June 25th, 2013, Taipei.
• Jie Liu gave a keynote address at Com.Geo 2013 on mobile location sensing.
• MIT Technology Review’s blog on Cloud-Offloaded GPS.

CLEON:

CLEON is a sensor node that collects raw GPS samples and stores it to an SD card.

MSP430F5338 microcontroller at 12MHz Max 2769 GPS receiver A LiPo rechargeable battery Battery-backed up real-time clock microSD card

We will soon release the reference design of the hardware and our collaborators at Purdue University have created firmware for it.

LEAP Web Services:

The Low Energy Assisted Positioning (LEAP) web service is deployed on Windows Azure at https://msr-leap.cloudapp.net. The internal architecture of the service is shown in the figure below.

To use the service, the user must request an ID from Microsoft Research. The GPS samples in the data file must be organized as defined for LEAP’s headers in GpsSignalDataHeader.cs class in the CO-GPS tool kit. Once requests are successfully queued in the system, a request ID will be returned to the client, who can use the ID to request the results later.

This video shows an example of using LEAP web service. We will soon release a sample app that uses the LEAP web service for location resolution.