Presenter: Gang Han, Ph.D Candidate in Statistics

Title: Received signal strength (RSS) based animal localization and movement modeling

Abstract: We propose received signal strength (RSS), based models, for locating animals and tracking their movement. The magnitudes of the RSS measured by antennae in a wireless sensor network are functions of the distance and angle between the signal source and each antenna. We developed an additive model for RSS in terms of distance and angle, in which the angle information was incorporated in RSS modeling for the first time. The unknown location of a stationary transmitter was estimated by inverse prediction using the fitted RSS model, in which location was considered as an unknown parameter in a nonlinear model. And lastly, we developed a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to track a moving animal from a time series of observed RSS. Discrete-time and continuous-time HMMs provide different descriptions of animal behavior.  These are fitted and compared. Collectively, these methods provide a way to estimate the location and track the movement of small animals in the field.