Ubiquitous Positioning

Positioning and navigation play an increasingly important and pervasive role in our day to day lives. For example ‘satnavs’ have become standard equipment for motorists on unfamiliar journeys. Ubiquitous navigation requires an accurate and timely estimate of a user’s position at all times, in all environments and across all modes of transport. In some cases Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GPS have made this a trivial problem. In others, for example indoors or near buildings, accurate positioning is still a considerable technical challenge.

A high accuracy ubiquitous navigation solution which isn’t dependent on any one positioning technique is being developed at Horizon. Methods such as inertial dead reckoning, WiFi fingerprinting and RFID are combined with or used alongside a GNSS solution. Each technique brings it’s own benefits and drawbacks but all contribute to a ubiquitous solution.

The aim of this project is develop a test bed ubiquitous positioning solution which can be used to develop and enable a broad range of location based products and services within the digital economy. Some sample applications include:

• Turn-by-turn indoor navigation.
• Contextual information provision (for example information about a product on a shelf or an exhibit in a museum).
• Geo-Social networking.
• Location based mobile advertising.
• Navigation for the visually impaired.

Check out the poster on Ubiquitous Positioning