Satish Ravishankar is a Masters student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University's Pittsburgh Campus. His primary research focus is in the area of accessible technology. He is currently focused on developing cost-effective assistive technology aimed at those in need not only in the developed but also in developing countries.

The primary goal of this project is to explore the possibility of improving indoor localization for blind travelers via crowdsourcing. This project seeks to improve indoor localization accuracy via ubiquitous smartphones by using crowdsourcing to validate and refine the database used to store and analyze landmark information for indoor localization. We first create an initial database of suitable landmarks such as Wi-Fi signal strength, electro-magnetic variations, and so on. We then calculate coarse localization estimates using these landmarks and validate or refine these estimates via a smartphone app used by visitors to that indoor location. The input from this crowdsourcing will be used to better categorize the landmarks as identifiable zones within the building, and also to potentially add new landmarks.