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| Next | Alternative Positioning Technologies Krzysztof Kolodziej Industry consultant KKolodziej@indoorLBS.com
Today, there is a vast array of so-called location
technologies that are involved in the calculation
of a user’s or object’s position in a
space or grid, based on some mathematical model. Positioning
here means allowing a mobile device to be aware of
it’s location with different degrees of precision and accuracy.
The technology required for provision of automated
location information to mobile devices has been in continual
development for several decades. While the majority
has its roots in military, modern consumer technology is
also raising to meet the challenges, specifically in metropolitan
areas. Telecommunication initiatives like the US
FCC’s E911 and Europe’s E112 have generated a lot of interest
in applications and services that are a function of a
user’s or an object’s location, referred to as location-based
services (LBS).
Unfortunately, millions of square meters of indoor space and urban areas are out of reach of GPS systems. Conventional GPS receivers don’t work inside buildings due to absence of line of sight to satellites, while cellular positioning methods generally fail to provide a satisfactory degree of accuracy. The delivered position fixes cannot be used for determining whether a target person stays inside or outside a certain building, not to mention that it is by no means possible to locate it with the granularity of rooms or floors. Fortunately, over the past decade, advances in location possible to locate users and objects indoors. These alternative technologies are now being introduced to the market enabling indoor (in-building) positioning. Different technologies will demand different capabilities from the device, while they’ll bring various constraints. Outside the remit of 2G, 2.5G, 3G, and 4G cellular networks, exist other families of positioning technologies that are often referred to as ‘local positioning,’ which make use of short range networks such as 802.11, Bluetooth, RFID, ultrasound, UWB, IrDA, or TV radio signals. Indoor positioning and tracking applications aren’t just a vision or found only “in the lab.” The potentials of locationaware indoor applications were realized as early as the 1990s. They were explored in conjunction with research on ubiquitous / sentient computing since the beginning of the 1990s. Indoor environments present opportunities for a rich set of location-aware applications such as navigation tools for humans and robots, interactive virtual games, resource discovery, asset tracking, location-aware sensor networking etc. Further, typical indoor applications require different types of location information such as physical space, position and orientation. There are different types of indoor, urban, and seamless indoor-outdoor location-aware applications, their requirements in terms of the infrastructure needed to support them, and the current limitations. There are books specifically about this e.g., Kolodziej’s Local Positioning System: LBS Applications and Services for indoor use. The book gives a detailed coverage on the most promising technologies, which are WLAN fingerprinting, RFID positioning, and indoor positioning with non radiolocation positioning with infrared and ultrasound. Also, the book addresses the problem of absence of a common integrated approach for universal positioning technology. This results partly in a demand for standalone indoor solutions. The TV-GPS positioning technology that is featured in the book has the promise for enabling seamless indoor-outdoor positioning. EXAMPLE 1: THE NEED AND UTILITY OF A DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ADVANCED 3D LOCATOR SYSTEM There is a need to be able to accurately locate and track incident responders in situations such as: inside of threatened buildings, collapsed buildings, and subterranean facilities or underground. Accurate location and tracking is necessary in order to allow emergency managers, including fire chiefs and other incident commanders, to rapidly and effectively deploy and re-deploy their forces or understand and respond to the consequences of potential threats to their forces. The systems have to be fast, have to be able to find information with respect to the context and have to be able to integrate different data (existing or coming from the field) for further analysis and decision-making. Consider the Advanced 3-D Locator System under development by the Department of Homeland Security. The system needs to provide timely operational support for all-discipline, all-hazards scenarios in a broad range of environmental conditions and terrain. Users of Advanced 3-D Locator System are the following: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Emergency Preparedness and Response Portfolio
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