Cricket is indoor location system for pervasive and sensor-based computing environments, such as those envisioned by MIT’s Project Oxygen. Cricket provides fine-grained location information—space identifiers, position coordinates, and orientation—to applications running on handhelds, laptops, and sensor nodes.There have been two major versions of Cricket to date (July 2004). Cricket v2, the current version, is substantially more accurate and energy-efficient compared to Cricket v1. v2 has a new software stack that runs on TinyOS, has better support for continuous object tracking, has support for various auto-configuration algorithms, etc. You can buy Cricket v2 units from Crossbow Technologies. The software for Cricket v2 (both embedded software and higher-layer software that runs on laptops/handhelds are available here. This software is under an open source license and can be used for education, research, and commercial purposes as long as the requirements in the copyright notice are followed. Cricket available from Crossbow Technologies may not be preloaded with the embedded software when shipped individually (to program the Crickets you will need a MIB510CA programmer).
Many applications in pervasive and sensor computing environments are context-aware, benefitting from knowledge of their external context, such as their location. Location may be specified as a coordinate position in some coordinate system, a geographic space such as a room or portion of a room, and as the orientation of a device within some coordinate system. Examples of location-aware applications that can be developed using Cricket including resource discovery, human/robot navigation, physical/virtual computer games, location-aware sensing, hospital/medical applications (e.g., equipment and patient tracking/monitoring), stream migration, pose-aware applications like the software flashlight/marker, etc.
Cricket is intended for use indoors or in urban areas where outdoor systems like the Global Positioning System (GPS) don’t work well. It can provide distance ranging and positioning precision of between 1 and 3 cm, so applications that benefit from better accuracy that the cellular E-911 services and GPS will also find Cricket useful. Cricket is designed for low-power operation and can be used as a location-aware sensor computing node (running TinyOS), to which a variety of sensors can be attached.
ref
http://cricket.csail.mit.edu/#overview
