Rover Technology

ROVER, which stands for Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, is a system which allows ground forces, such as Forward Air Controllers (FAC), to see what an aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is seeing in real time by receiving images acquired by the aircraft's sensors on a laptop on the ground. There's little time delay and usage of ROVER greatly improves the FAC on the ground reconnaissance and target identification which are essential to close air support.

Rover Technology adds a user's location to other dimensions of system awareness, such as time, user preferences, and client device capabilities. The software architecture of Rover systems is designed to scale to large user populations.

Consider a group touring the museums in Washington, D.C. The group arrives at a registration point, where each person receives a handheld device with audio, video, and wireless communication capabilities. an off-the-shelf PDA available in the market today. A wireless-based system tracks the location of these devices and presents relevant information about displayed objects as the user moves through the museum. Users can query their devices for maps and optimal routes to objects of interest. They can also use the devices to reserve and purchase tickets to museum events later in the day. The group leader can send messages to coordinate group activities.

The part of this system that automatically tailors information and services to a mobile user's location is the basis for location-aware computing. This computing paradigm augments the more traditional dimensions of system awareness, such as time-, user-, and device-awareness. All the technology components to realize location-aware computing are available in the marketplace today. What has hindered the widespread deployment of location-based systems is the lack of an integration architecture that scales with user populations.

ROVER ARCHITECTURE

Rover technology tracks the location of system users and dynamically configures application-level information to different link-layer technologies and client-device capabilities. A Rover system represents a single domain of administrative control, managed and moderated by a Rover controller. Figure 1_ shows a large application domain partitioned into multiple administrative domains, each with its own Rover system - much like the Internet's Domain Name System" 2

End users interact with the system through Rover client devices- typically wireless handheld units with varying capabilities for processing, memory and storage, graphics and display, and network interfaces. Rover maintains a profile for each device, identifying its capabilities and configuring content accordingly. Rover also maintains end-user profiles, defining specific user interests and serving content tailored to them.

A wireless access infrastructure provides connectivity to the Rover clients. In the current implementation, we have defined a technique to determine location based on certain properties of the wireless access infrastructure. Although Rover can leverage such properties of specific air interfaces,1 its location management technique is not tied to a particular wireless technology. Moreover, different wireless interfaces can coexist in a single Rover system or in different domains of a multi-Rover system. Software radio technology3 offers a way to integrate the different interfaces into a single device. This would allow the device to easily roam between various Rover systems, each with different wireless access technologies.

A server system implements and manages Rover's end-user services. The server system consists of five components:

The Rover controller is the system's "brain." It manages the different services that Rover clients request, scheduling and filtering the content according to the current location and the user and device profiles.

The location server is a dedicated unit that manages the client device location services within the Rover system. Alternatively, applications can use an externally available location service, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS).

For more Visit: Rover Technology: Enabling Scalable Location-Aware Computing