Measure my Cats movements , Accuracy of Mobile phone GPS at metre scale . how to improve it

Question

I wanted to get some information related to an idea I have I have a lot of cats and a big garden.

The cats generally roam through the garden and this location is fixed and Known

If i have known area , in this case my garden , does this make getting location information GPS , more accurate

Can i track my Cats accurately if i hook them up to a mobile phone.(Picture 1)

I have found the thread here about GPS accuracy What is the maximum Theoretical accuracy of GPS?

How accurate will this be , to 2 metres is this relatisic with mobile GPS

If i had more than one cat with a mobile , Could these devices talk to one another to give an more accurate picture ( picture 2 )

If i was able to put some fixed mobile reciever points in Could be combined with cats mobiles to give more accurate read out ( picture 3)

The outputs of what i like to be able to Capture

xy information per second for my Cat

How accurate would this be . Could this be done , by only using mobile phones. Are there better options

Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3

Answer 1

If the area is known and stationary, why not skip GPS altogether and use beacons? You can get accuracy up to a few inches using that approach. As of today, there are many software+hardware SDKs that are coming out that enable you to pinpoint location using fixed beacons and a local coordinate system (which then you can translate to a different coordinate system if that is your thing).

http://indoo.rs/beacons/

http://estimote.com/indoor/

and many more.

Answer 2

If you're using just a mobile phone, I don't think you would be able to get much more than that unless they support some form of differential correction or post processing.

I haven't heard of that support in mobile phones yet. GPS units that collect that type of info (in my experience) are generally rather large and may weigh as much and be as big as your cats. We use sub-meter units that are at least $3.5K/unit so it wouldn't be feasible.

Some mobile phones may be more accurate than others. I believe most of that would depend on the type of GPS chip they're using and whether they support corrections via the cellular network/wifi.

For the devices talking to one another, you could probably do something like that. I would imagine it as using either bluetooth (2) or wifi (2+ with host) connections among the phones and some custom programming to sort out and manually correct locations.

Since I am unaware of an already made mobile solution for this, I would imagine this would be a great undertaking involving lots of custom programming to accomplish your task.

You might have better luck finding something that allows you to lay out a grid (your garden) to capture information. I would think it would have some known points or multiple sensors reading information from radio trackers. That information could then be translated into lat/long. The translation process would probably be pretty tricky since you would need to have known, fixed, and accurate points for your grid. Then you come into the problem of how accurate is the GPS you're using to collect that grid information.

Answer 3

Completely agree @Ragi Yaser. Beacons help a great deal in locating objects of living or non-living nature. The accuracy also is high and helps in positioning of objects indoor. For instance, Pigeon Indoor Positioning and Navigation App facilities indoor wayfinding for large facilities such as resorts, medical facilities, shopping malls, museums, convention centers, etc.

Check here for more info: http://pigeon.srisys.com/