Ubiquitous Indoor Localization: The Indoor Equivalent of GPS

Although GPS has been considered a ubiquitous outdoor localization technology, we are still far from a similar technology for indoor environments. While a number of technologies have been proposed for indoor localization, they are isolated efforts that are way from a true ubiquitous localization system. A ubiquitous indoor positioning system is envisioned to be deployed on a large scale worldwide, with minimum overhead, to work with heterogeneous devices, and to allow users to roam seamlessly from indoor to outdoor environments. Such a system will enable a wide set of applications including worldwide seamless direction finding between indoor locations, enhancing first responders' safety by providing anywhere localization and floor plans, and providing a richer environment for location-aware social networking applications. In this talk, we will describe an architecture for the ubiquitous indoor positioning system (IPS) and the challenges that have to be addressed to materialize it. We will then focus on the feasibility of different components of the architecture including accurate infrastructure-less indoor localization and automating the construction of a worldwide indoor floor plan database. This includes constructing different layer of semantics for the floor plans. We will finally identify different research directions for addressing the challenges of realizing a true ubiquitous IPS system. This talk is a part of the ACM Distinguished Speaker Program. Professor Ashok Agrawala is the host for this talk.