The Geospatial Promised Land: Indoor Positioning

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain a few weeks ago, a company called Loctronix introduced meter-level indoor positioning technology. “In 50 meters, turn left to find Macy’s Department store” is not very far in our future. This technology and others one step closer to making accurate indoor navigation possible so you can navigate from store-to-store inside a shopping mall or even navigate to particular items within a particular store.

It’s all about sensor fusion. CSR’s SiRFstar V/SiRFusion technology uses data from all available satellite navigation systems from the U.S., Europe, Russia, China and Japan, as well as WiFi, cellular systems, accelerometers, gyros, and compasses. Loctronix calls their technology Doppler Aided Inertial Navigation (DAIN) and Spectral Compression Positioning (SCP) which allows them to obtain one meter positioning outdoors, indoors, and even underground without relying on external servers with the following features:

• Client-based, sensor fusion software platform producing real-time position, speed, direction of motion, and heading information.
• Optional integrated GPS/GNSS signal and navigation processing – using Loctronix’ SCP hybrid technology.
• Fully integrated map-matching functionality with support for third-party map data.
• Optional WiFi RSSI location and access point profiling.
• Third-party LBS API support.
• Multiple implementation options supporting existing smartphones and next-generation wireless devices.

Think about what would happen if indoor positioning is actually implemented per the above, able to deliver one meter accuracy. Less than ten years ago, the automobile Personal Navigation Device (PND) market was in its infancy. GPS positioning was clearly able to deliver the accuracy required for point-to-point street navigation. What makes the PND valuable is the outdoor map database. These are the highly detailed digital maps from Navteq/Nokia and TeleAtlas/TomTom that are inside 90% of the PNDs in the world. Drawing from this experience, it’s obvious that indoor mapping databases are going to be huge, not only the location of stores, but the location of items on the shelves within stores. A friend of mine works for a large national retail chain in the U.S. He said they’ve tried aisle-to-aisle navigation technology before, and it failed. It was too difficult for the shopper to use. What that tells me is that the demand is there, in a big way.

The PND market in the 1990s was messing around too, trying to arrive at a technology and price point for mass adoption. Indoor navigation is on the same path, only this time it won’t be Navteq/Nokia and TeleAtlas/TomTom leading the pack.