Today you can easily find your way to, say, the nearest Starbucks in a strange city, thanks to a cascade of events that began a little more than 30 years ago, when a Soviet Sukhoi interceptor flying high over the Sea of Japan fired off two heat-seeking missiles. The long-term result: You now have no trouble locating a cappuccino.
Of course, you’re not finding that coffee by the heat it gives off. You are most likely guided to it in missile-like fashion by the GPS receiver in your smartphone or on your dashboard. That ubiquitous piece of consumer technology works—indeed exists—only because the U.S. Department of Defense allowed civilian use of its satellite-based positioning system. That wasn’t the original plan. The Global Positioning System was supposed to be exclusively for soldiers, sailors, and airmen, until President Ronald Reagan ordered a sudden change in policy in response to the deaths of 269 people aboard a Korean airliner that veered into Soviet territory on 1 September 1983. Believing it to be a military aircraft on a spying mission, Soviet air defense forces shot it down.
The Department of Defense dutifully carried out Reagan’s instructions to make GPS signals available for civilian uses, but it hedged at first, adding random timing errors to the satellite signals accessible to nonmilitary GPS units so they could determine locations to no better than 100 meters. Then in 2000, after President Bill Clinton ordered this purposeful degradation to be stopped, the error circle shrank to 10 meters or so. All of a sudden, GPS became extremely valuable for vehicle and even pedestrian navigation.
Those shifts in U.S. policy, along with the plummeting cost of GPS chip sets and the proliferation of smartphones, ended up putting formidable satellite-navigation capabilities in almost everyone’s pocket. The rub is that radio signals coming from distant satellites can’t help where the view of the sky is obstructed, which makes navigating in narrow canyons, urban or otherwise, tough going. And these high-frequency signals bounce around so much when they hit metal that getting a good GPS fix indoors usually proves impossible.
It’s a huge problem, one that radio engineers are keen to solve. They’ve been pursuing a host of different strategies to help us find our way about indoors and also to track movable assets—hospital equipment, specialty tools on the factory floor, mobile robots, livestock, you name it. Here are the technical underpinnings of the leading possibilities, along with some educated guesses as to how they will pan out.
“Indoor navigation is very, very tricky,” says Kaveh Pahlavan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts. As director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, he has closely followed the various radio-based positioning methods that have emerged over the years and watched how these technologies have shaken out. Often, he notes, progress isn’t just a function of technical promise. Business realities regularly trump that. “The fact is, what industry selects is important,” he says. “Today, Wi-Fi localization is the most popular.”
Boston-based Skyhook Wireless, which Pahlavan advises on technical matters, is one of many companies offering positioning based on Wi-Fi (and cellular signals and GPS, where those are also available). The company maintains a huge database of the often-changing geographic locations of Wi-Fi access points by hiring an army of “wardrivers”—people who drive around while recording Wi-Fi signals and GPS positions. A user with a handset running one of the Skyhook-enabled apps can then apply the company’s various proprietary algorithms to gauge position based on which of the mapped access points are within range and how strong the received signals are. The beauty of this approach is that it requires no additional infrastructure, and any Wi-Fi–equipped phone, tablet, or laptop can be used without modification. That’s why the original iPhone and iPod Touch models (which lacked GPS receivers) used Skyhook for position estimation.
How good are the position fixes? Skyhook’s tests show typical indoor accuracies of 3 to 10 meters. That’s better than GPS manages outdoors, but it still could easily misidentify the room you’re in or the floor you’re on. Accuracies can be improved, though, by adding more access points and carefully charting the radio environment within a building of interest. That’s what Wifarer, for example, of Victoria, B.C., Canada, does to produce site-specific Android and iOS apps for displaying position-dependent information. Impressively, its app users were able to pinpoint their locations to within about a meter and a half, on average, at the Royal BC Museum, where the company rolled out its system last year.
Being able to fix indoor positions to within a couple of meters is great for finding your way around museums, airports, convention centers, or malls, but it’s not adequate for many other situations. Imagine that you’re designing a mail-delivery robot. A location error of just 2 meters will have it, and you, bouncing off the walls. And the Wi-Fi strategy doesn’t work at all for first responders—say, firefighters trapped inside a burning building. [See “The Way Through the Flames,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2013.] If you’re willing to install radio equipment designed specifically with positioning in mind, though, there’s no shortage of options.
Beacons of Opportunity
Google began providing Android users with navigational aids at certain popular indoor locales two years ago. One of the first locations to be electronically charted in this way was the Mall of America, located in Bloomington, Minn. As the most visited shopping mall in the United States, the Mall of America receives more than 40 million visitors each year, many of whom no doubt get lost wandering in its cavernous interior.
GPS signals don’t work well in such settings, and positions calculated using transmissions from cell towers would be awkwardly imprecise. As a consequence, the location-finding abilities of Google Maps depend heavily on broadcasts from the mall’s many Wi-Fi access points.
Google’s Wi-Fi database is proprietary, but WiGLE (Wi-Fi Geographic Location Engine), which contains data on more than 100 million access points, provides some sense of where they can be found.
WiGLE locations for Wi-Fi access points at the Mall of America [shown in the panels at right] could be significantly off, and in any event they’re not particularly up to date. So please note that this illustration should not be used for navigation.
One company offering help with that is Q-Track, based in Huntsville, Ala., which claims its indoor radiolocation system can provide submeter accuracy. It uses frequencies of about 1 megahertz, which is considerably lower than Wi-Fi. Why? “You want to have a signal that can get through a messy propagation environment,” says Hans Schantz, cofounder of Q-Track. Low frequencies can more easily penetrate the many barriers found indoors. They diffract less around obstacles, and they don’t fall prey to the multipath phenomenon, whereby the different waves caroming around inside a building interfere with one another.
Q-Track’s system differs from Wi-Fi localization in another fundamental way: It doesn’t use signal strength to gauge the distance between transmitter and receiver. Nor does it measure the time it takes the signal to travel from transmitter to receiver, as GPS does. Instead, it cleverly exploits the fact that at frequencies of a megahertz or so, and at building-size distances (say, up to 100 meters), the receiver operates in what radio engineers call the near field of the transmitter.
In this special zone, the emanations from a radio antenna are rather peculiar. The electric and magnetic fields do not rise and fall in lockstep, for example, as is normally the case with radio waves. And the difference in their timing (their relative phase) is, conveniently enough, a function of the distance from the transmitting antenna.
Q-Track uses the distance-dependent difference in phase, as well as other features found only in the near field, to calculate the location of a transmitter tag with respect to fixed receivers. Those receivers are fitted with antennas that can separately measure electric and magnetic fields. Outdoors, the system is accurate to 15 centimeters, but indoors, the structural elements of a building produce errors of as much as several meters. But by mapping out the site’s radio environment first, says Schantz, the system can locate one of its tags indoors to within 40 cm.
Although that might seem as precise as you’d ever need, applications like robot navigation demand even better. Also, Q-Track’s receiving equipment is bulky, and its tags are power hungry. Even with rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, they last at most a few weeks. So while the system works well in some settings, it’s hard to see it going into countless key fobs, cellphones, RFID tags, and wireless access points, which is what would be required for indoor positioning to become truly ubiquitous.
One company hoping to overcome those hurdles is DecaWave, a Dublin-based fabless semiconductor manufacturer that has just released a wireless-networking chip designed to provide extremely precise indoor locations. It uses very brief bursts of radio energy, akin to those emitted by some radars, and can measure the time it takes these pulses to travel between radios to a fraction of a nanosecond, allowing distances to be determined to better than 10 cm. The brevity of the emitted pulses ensures that multipath interference won’t cause problems, because the reflected pulses are well separated in time from those taking the direct path between transmitter and receiver. It also means that the transmissions have a very large spectral bandwidth—about 500 MHz wide for Deca
Today you can easily find your way to, say, the nearest Starbucks in a strange city, thanks to a cascade of events that began a little more than 30 years ago, when a Soviet Sukhoi interceptor flying high over the Sea of Japan fired off two heat-seeking missiles. The long-term result: You now have no trouble locating a cappuccino.
Of course, you’re not finding that coffee by the heat it gives off. You are most likely guided to it in missile-like fashion by the GPS receiver in your smartphone or on your dashboard. That ubiquitous piece of consumer technology works—indeed exists—only because the U.S. Department of Defense allowed civilian use of its satellite-based positioning system. That wasn’t the original plan. The Global Positioning System was supposed to be exclusively for soldiers, sailors, and airmen, until President Ronald Reagan ordered a sudden change in policy in response to the deaths of 269 people aboard a Korean airliner that veered into Soviet territory on 1 September 1983. Believing it to be a military aircraft on a spying mission, Soviet air defense forces shot it down.
The Department of Defense dutifully carried out Reagan’s instructions to make GPS signals available for civilian uses, but it hedged at first, adding random timing errors to the satellite signals accessible to nonmilitary GPS units so they could determine locations to no better than 100 meters. Then in 2000, after President Bill Clinton ordered this purposeful degradation to be stopped, the error circle shrank to 10 meters or so. All of a sudden, GPS became extremely valuable for vehicle and even pedestrian navigation.
Those shifts in U.S. policy, along with the plummeting cost of GPS chip sets and the proliferation of smartphones, ended up putting formidable satellite-navigation capabilities in almost everyone’s pocket. The rub is that radio signals coming from distant satellites can’t help where the view of the sky is obstructed, which makes navigating in narrow canyons, urban or otherwise, tough going. And these high-frequency signals bounce around so much when they hit metal that getting a good GPS fix indoors usually proves impossible.
It’s a huge problem, one that radio engineers are keen to solve. They’ve been pursuing a host of different strategies to help us find our way about indoors and also to track movable assets—hospital equipment, specialty tools on the factory floor, mobile robots, livestock, you name it. Here are the technical underpinnings of the leading possibilities, along with some educated guesses as to how they will pan out.
“Indoor navigation is very, very tricky,” says Kaveh Pahlavan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts. As director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, he has closely followed the various radio-based positioning methods that have emerged over the years and watched how these technologies have shaken out. Often, he notes, progress isn’t just a function of technical promise. Business realities regularly trump that. “The fact is, what industry selects is important,” he says. “Today, Wi-Fi localization is the most popular.”
Boston-based Skyhook Wireless, which Pahlavan advises on technical matters, is one of many companies offering positioning based on Wi-Fi (and cellular signals and GPS, where those are also available). The company maintains a huge database of the often-changing geographic locations of Wi-Fi access points by hiring an army of “wardrivers”—people who drive around while recording Wi-Fi signals and GPS positions. A user with a handset running one of the Skyhook-enabled apps can then apply the company’s various proprietary algorithms to gauge position based on which of the mapped access points are within range and how strong the received signals are. The beauty of this approach is that it requires no additional infrastructure, and any Wi-Fi–equipped phone, tablet, or laptop can be used without modification. That’s why the original iPhone and iPod Touch models (which lacked GPS receivers) used Skyhook for position estimation.
How good are the position fixes? Skyhook’s tests show typical indoor accuracies of 3 to 10 meters. That’s better than GPS manages outdoors, but it still could easily misidentify the room you’re in or the floor you’re on. Accuracies can be improved, though, by adding more access points and carefully charting the radio environment within a building of interest. That’s what Wifarer, for example, of Victoria, B.C., Canada, does to produce site-specific Android and iOS apps for displaying position-dependent information. Impressively, its app users were able to pinpoint their locations to within about a meter and a half, on average, at the Royal BC Museum, where the company rolled out its system last year.
Being able to fix indoor positions to within a couple of meters is great for finding your way around museums, airports, convention centers, or malls, but it’s not adequate for many other situations. Imagine that you’re designing a mail-delivery robot. A location error of just 2 meters will have it, and you, bouncing off the walls. And the Wi-Fi strategy doesn’t work at all for first responders—say, firefighters trapped inside a burning building. [See “The Way Through the Flames,” IEEE Spectrum, September 2013.] If you’re willing to install radio equipment designed specifically with positioning in mind, though, there’s no shortage of options.
Beacons of Opportunity
Google began providing Android users with navigational aids at certain popular indoor locales two years ago. One of the first locations to be electronically charted in this way was the Mall of America, located in Bloomington, Minn. As the most visited shopping mall in the United States, the Mall of America receives more than 40 million visitors each year, many of whom no doubt get lost wandering in its cavernous interior.
GPS signals don’t work well in such settings, and positions calculated using transmissions from cell towers would be awkwardly imprecise. As a consequence, the location-finding abilities of Google Maps depend heavily on broadcasts from the mall’s many Wi-Fi access points.
Google’s Wi-Fi database is proprietary, but WiGLE (Wi-Fi Geographic Location Engine), which contains data on more than 100 million access points, provides some sense of where they can be found.
WiGLE locations for Wi-Fi access points at the Mall of America [shown in the panels at right] could be significantly off, and in any event they’re not particularly up to date. So please note that this illustration should not be used for navigation.
One company offering help with that is Q-Track, based in Huntsville, Ala., which claims its indoor radiolocation system can provide submeter accuracy. It uses frequencies of about 1 megahertz, which is considerably lower than Wi-Fi. Why? “You want to have a signal that can get through a messy propagation environment,” says Hans Schantz, cofounder of Q-Track. Low frequencies can more easily penetrate the many barriers found indoors. They diffract less around obstacles, and they don’t fall prey to the multipath phenomenon, whereby the different waves caroming around inside a building interfere with one another.
Q-Track’s system differs from Wi-Fi localization in another fundamental way: It doesn’t use signal strength to gauge the distance between transmitter and receiver. Nor does it measure the time it takes the signal to travel from transmitter to receiver, as GPS does. Instead, it cleverly exploits the fact that at frequencies of a megahertz or so, and at building-size distances (say, up to 100 meters), the receiver operates in what radio engineers call the near field of the transmitter.
In this special zone, the emanations from a radio antenna are rather peculiar. The electric and magnetic fields do not rise and fall in lockstep, for example, as is normally the case with radio waves. And the difference in their timing (their relative phase) is, conveniently enough, a function of the distance from the transmitting antenna.
Q-Track uses the distance-dependent difference in phase, as well as other features found only in the near field, to calculate the location of a transmitter tag with respect to fixed receivers. Those receivers are fitted with antennas that can separately measure electric and magnetic fields. Outdoors, the system is accurate to 15 centimeters, but indoors, the structural elements of a building produce errors of as much as several meters. But by mapping out the site’s radio environment first, says Schantz, the system can locate one of its tags indoors to within 40 cm.
Although that might seem as precise as you’d ever need, applications like robot navigation demand even better. Also, Q-Track’s receiving equipment is bulky, and its tags are power hungry. Even with rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, they last at most a few weeks. So while the system works well in some settings, it’s hard to see it going into countless key fobs, cellphones, RFID tags, and wireless access points, which is what would be required for indoor positioning to become truly ubiquitous.
One company hoping to overcome those hurdles is DecaWave, a Dublin-based fabless semiconductor manufacturer that has just released a wireless-networking chip designed to provide extremely precise indoor locations. It uses very brief bursts of radio energy, akin to those emitted by some radars, and can measure the time it takes these pulses to travel between radios to a fraction of a nanosecond, allowing distances to be determined to better than 10 cm. The brevity of the emitted pulses ensures that multipath interference won’t cause problems, because the reflected pulses are well separated in time from those taking the direct path between transmitter and receiver. It also means that the transmissions have a very large spectral bandwidth—about 500 MHz wide for Deca
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