The Golden Age of Indoor Positioning

Dr. Roy Want, Google Inc.

Abstract: We are living at a time when technology development to support indoor positioning, and proximity ranging, is reaching an inflection point for adoption. With multiple standards being developed for accurate ranging through WiFi (IEEE 802.11mc/az/bk), Bluetooth Channel Sounding (BTCS), and UWB (IEEE 802.15.4a/z/4ab) we are already seeing implementations that enable effective indoor positioning solutions with less than 1 meter of error. This is a breakthrough, enabling aisle-level navigation in retail stores and public venues using our smartphones. This talk will describe the various positioning technologies, and our experience with early implementations. It will provide a comparison of their wireless characteristics, and make predictions about future adoption.

Biography: Dr. Roy Want received his doctorate from Cambridge University, England in 1988, and is currently a Senior Research Scientist at Google. Previous positions include Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, and a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC. He holds the grade of ACM and IEEE Fellow. His research interests include mobile and ubiquitous computing, context-aware applications, and electronic identification. He has more than 30 years' experience working in the field of mobile computing. He served as: Editor-in-chief for IEEE Pervasive Computing from 2006-2009, Chair of the ACM SIGMOBILE executive committee from 2009-12, and received the ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contributions Award (OCA) in 2019. He has authored or co-authored more than 85 publications, with 100+ issued patents in this area. For more information about Dr. Want's academic and industrial achievements see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Want.