Yusuf Simonson, Robert Fowler, Edgar Lobaton, Ron Alterovitz. Technical Report TR-12-01, Designing Smart Camera Networks using
Smartphone Platforms: A Case Study, Renaissance Computing Institute, The Department of Computer Science of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, January, 2012.
We believe that new smartphone architectures like Android and iOS will play increasingly important roles in sensor network design. Because of this, we wish to investigate the state of development for sensor network-based applications on the Android framework. We introduce an application for Android that allows for the semi-autonomous remote control of Rovio robots. It coordinates with a sensor network of cameras to provide a live stream of camera images and predicted robot locations. Furthermore, it provides functionality for moving the robot to user-selected destinations without the need for manual control. The application acts as a straw man for working with traditional sensor network architectures, and provides important insight on some of the challenges related to sensor network development, especially on the Android platform. We outline these challenges and provide some suggestions on semantics that could alleviate development effort.