Design and Implementation of a GPS based Personal Tracking System

Abstract

Tracking based applications have been quite popular in recent times. Most of them have been limited to commercial applications such as vehicular tracking (e.g tracking of a train etc). However, not much work has been done towards design of a personal tracking system. Our Research work is an attempt to design such personal tracking system. In this paper, we have shared glimpses of our research work. The objective of our research project is to design & develop a system which is capable of tracking and monitoring a person, object or any other asset of importance (called as target). The system uses GPS to determine the exact position of the target. The target is aided with a compact handheld device which consists of a GPS receiver and GSM modem. GPS receiver obtains location coordinates (viz. Latitude & Longitude) from GPS satellites. The location information in NMEA format is decoded, formatted and sent to control station, through a GSM modem. Due to use of Open CPU development platform, no external Microcontroller is required, with additional advantage of compact size product, reduced design & development time and reduced cost. Thus, the proposed system is able to track the accurate location of target. This system finds applications in tracking old-age people, tracking animals in forest, tracking delivery of goods etc. Our final designed system is a small-size compact l.S"X3.7S" Tracker system with position accuracy error <30m (100 feet).