From Compass to Positioning Systems: Evolution of Location Tracking

Location tracking has become such an ubiquitous term that it’s nearly impossible to imagine our lives without it. Outdoor navigation using GPS is an integral part of our daily lives. One study claims that GPS Tracking Device Market would be worth $2.89 bn by 2023. Almost every app you use on your smartphone utilizes GPS to fetch location specific info/feed.

GPS finds its extensive use in finding routes, distance, mode of conveyance etc. As useful as it is for outdoor tracking, it fails to work in indoors. That necessitates the need of indoor positioning systems which guides you in searching objects in a confined space.

Now, let’s go back in time and get to know how the location tracking technologies have reached its current status.

History of Compass

The 1st hint of a compass trades back to China during 221–206 B.C. While using ladles made of lodestones in their fortune telling rituals, Chinese noticed its strange property to always point in the North-South direction. This mysterious property of Lodestone is attributed to its natural magnetism. Thus, lodestone’s direction predicting abilities saw the light of the day prompting China to get its share of credits as the developer of the first compass.

The 1st compass was a square shaped slab with cardinal points and constellations marked all over it. The lodestone was shaped like a ladle whose handle would always point towards south. The ladle, later got replaced with magnetized needle. By 11th century, the use of compass as a navigating system gained huge popularity among sailors, voyagers etc.

Notable Discoveries

Antenna

It may be mentioned here that, in 2nd Century, Ptolemy wrote ‘Geography’ which laid the foundation of the standards for the use of latitude and longitude in maps.

Discovery of Electromagnetism in the year 1819, when Hans Christian Oersted reported that a current carry wire has an effect on nearby magnetic needle. This laid grounds for wide-scale emergence of electronic communications, leading to the invention of telegraph and electric motor.

The year 1895 is marked by Marconi establishing long distance radio transmission.

In the year 1957, Soviet Union launched the 1st artificial satellite Sputnik1. It was launched into a low Earth elliptical orbit. Sputnik 1 enabled scientists to gather a number of valuable information about the ionosphere and the density of the upper atmosphere.

Foundation of GPS Tracking

GPS Tracking

Sputnik’s location was calculated by using radio receivers by measuring the shifts in its radio signals due to ‘Doppler Effect’. After approximately 6 months from the launch of Sputnik 1, Frank McLure (the research director at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) came up with the question ‘Whether the reverse of this was possible? Can satellites be used to locate us instead?’

In the mid-1960s, The US Navy conducted experiments on satellite navigation in order to track their own submarines loaded with nuclear missiles. Six satellites were enough to pinpoint the exact locations of the submarines within a few minutes. In the year 1978, following the suit of the Navy scientists, the Department of Defense (DoD) too followed and launched NAVSTAR (Navigation System with Timing & Ranging) Satellite. This system became fully functional in 1993.

So, GPS was basically launched by US Military for their own use. But, an event in 1983 changed the course of the future by making GPS public. When a Korean passenger jet deviated form its original route and mistakenly entered into a Soviet prohibited area, it was shot down by Soviet SU-15. This triggered president Ronald Regan to make GPS public, considering that GPS could’ve prevented such mishap. Thus, GPS became public with an accuracy restricted to a radius of 100 meters. This was done in order to ensure that the best data was accessible to only the U.S military.

Fortunately, in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton made the standard GPS available to the public. And the rest, as they say, is history. Every location-aware app of your smartphone owes to that day.

Rise of Indoor Positioning

Indoor Positioning

As we progress, we are no longer restricted to getting lost in outdoors, indoor wayfinding or object finding too has become a major challenge. Shopping Malls, Airports, Warehouses are such confined areas where we often find ourselves stuck at some point in time, for not being able to find our desired shop or counter etc. You must’ve even tried to use GPS. But that’s where GPS takes the back seat.

Here come indoor positioning technologies to your rescue.

Microwave is easily impacted by obstacles like walls, roofs etc., so, GPS is not suitable for indoor positioning. Thus, if you wish to have a continuously unfettered navigation system, an integration of indoor and GPS would work for the best.

A recent report from the research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates the indoor location market — which includes indoor navigation as well as indoor data tracking (such as how long someone spends in a specific store in the mall) — will be worth $41 billion by 2022.

Future of Indoor Positioning

Indoor positioning is finding huge popularity across various industries like manufacturing transportation, logistics, healthcare, retail etc. In every sector, both navigational and tracking features are utilized.

A number of radio technologies are currently available which can help in creating a full-fledged indoor positioning system. Some of the most notable ones are — Ultra-Wide band (UWB), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wifi, RFiD, Zigbee. The choice of the technology is largely dependent on the use-case.

In manufacturing units, asset tracking is very important, thus, keeping track on every asset would be the prime functionality of an IPS. On the other hand, in shopping malls, both navigation and tracking become important. The shops can track the customers’ movements and the customers can navigate to their desired store.

The future for Indoor Positioning looks promising, especially with the evolution of high precision technologies like Ultra-Wideband (UWB). Probably the day is not very far, when you would miss the process of finding your ways out or searching any stuff inside your own houses. Very soon we would probably find ourselves having more time then we could ever spend.

Just like how we now talk about ‘the time we had to remember every route, ask for directions, sometimes roam around for hours before reaching the intended destinations?’, we would be talking about ‘the time we had to remember where we kept our stuffs, search for our forgotten stuffs for hours?’ The usage of the terms ‘lost/searching’ would become rare.

But, just like every technology, there are two facets to it. There’s already a lot of on-going debate on Google maps knowing about your whereabouts better than you yourself can remember. Cameras in shopping malls, airports are already doing more than enough to make us feel watched. So, how would we take it if we are told that this ‘watching’ would get serious as our visibility would get beyond cameras.

Probably the only place you can move freely is within your own homes. So, how would we react to our actions being tracked, probably to make our lives easier? Only time will tell…