I-Corps: An Accurate and Accessible Indoor Positioning Technology

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is centered around the ability to potentially reinvent interactions with indoor spaces. Similar to how GPS has revolutionized how we explore the world outdoors, indoor positioning can augment indoor experience with new information; having impact through the whole chain from end users to the surrounding industries. For example, the ability to track critical equipment indoors can save lives as in the hospital ER, understanding the flow of people inside of buildings can optimize our approach to energy management, and the availability of precise navigation indoors can be used by both humans and robots to streamline factory and warehouse operations. Commercially, the opportunity for this technology is significant. The general indoor positioning market is estimate to grow 42% annually to $10 billion by 2018. Today's indoor positioning solutions remain imprecise and/or too cumbersome to deploy - diluting their commercial and societal impact to date. This technology fills a crucial gap in this space by providing indoor positioning that is at the same time accurate, compatible with today's devices, and easy to deploy. This I-Corps project concerns an indoor positioning platform that is accurate, compatible with any Wi-Fi enabled user device (smartphones, tablets), and easily deployable. Research in this area has led to the development of hardware and algorithms that allow for sub-meter position accuracy indoors via easily manufactured compact Wi-Fi nodes built from commodity hardware. Simply placing these nodes at known locations in any indoor space allows for immediate positioning of user devices without additional pre-deployment effort. While GPS has revolutionized outdoor positioning, it does not work indoors. Current non-GPS solutions to this problem compromise accuracy, or require expensive hardware or calibration in the environment. This solution is both easy to deploy and accurate, filling an important gap in the indoor positioning industry.