Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology comes in handy for tracking cruise missiles, doing in-car navigation, and finding secluded restaurants. But step inside an airport, museum, or mall, and you’re often relegated to studying a paper map or asking for directions.
There are positioning systems designed for indoors, but they rely either on GPS-like radio or magnetic beacons, or on mapping the ever-shifting morass of Wi-Fi access points. Such methods have proved expensive to install and difficult to scale. What’s more, these indoor GPS systems are far from accurate enough to let you do cool things like a have a robot follow or avoid you.
Now researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab (CSAIL) have developed a way for adjacent Wi-Fi devices, including smartphones, to locate each other within centimeters. The technology, calledChronos, relies on making the devices emulate multi-gigahertz wideband radios.
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