Thales develops Indoor Positioning System based on UWB

Thales -- the French aerospace company that brought us MILTRAK -- has rolled out yet another impressive development, this time aiding firefighters, cops and armed forces in tracking objects / people while indoors. Its Indoor Positioning System (IPS) is essentially "an indoor form of satellite navigation," and while we've heard of similar, this iteration is based around ultra-wideband. Notably, the company implied that it hoped to bring the technology to police forces and military platoons in the future, and if things go smoothly, consumers could actually see it used in GPS-enabled mobiles in order to provide navigation services in more places. Unfortunately, it seems as though Thales is still working on completing the new system, so we wouldn't get all hopeful for a commercial release anytime soon.

[josh @ Dec 13th 2007 4:08AM]

hasnt anyone ever seen "Enemy of the State"?????

[Future Technologies @ Dec 13th 2007 5:07AM]

Indoor positioning systems are fantastic systems to make and there can be a huge market for them. Currently it is difficult to use robots inside buildings that can use GPS for navigation. If someone can come up with a decent commercial system that can be used for IPS without the need to engineer the environment, then they are going to be huge.

This article doesn't say anything about the technical aspects of the technology, so it is unclear if they simply use repeaters to emulate GPS in an indoor environment based on external antennas.

Once IPS is sorted, we will start to see many robots in our environment, existing with us in harmony and helping us with everything we want to do.

[Wwhat @ Dec 13th 2007 8:00AM]

Assuming we want to do what the government tells us to want to.

[Wwhat @ Dec 13th 2007 8:04AM]

Engadget scrwed up again, the last post was a reply to PSM

[Wwhat @ Dec 13th 2007 8:03AM]

Seem a quicker solution is for your GPS to store the last known location before you went inside and have bluetooth send it to your computer rather than having to type it in, all of which is already available.

[PSM @ Dec 13th 2007 6:41AM]

I've just gotten a GPS-enabled phone recently, and I would love for it to function indoors. While I don't have anything as life-and-death important to use it for as a firefighter or soldier, it would sure be nice to be sitting inside and call up Google Maps or LiveSearch and be able to have it search at my GPS location, without having to stand in the cold and rain waiting for it to find some satellites (between the tall buildings, if it can), only to give up and manually type in my location.

[hotmail_sucked @ Dec 13th 2007 8:22AM]

This isn't new. My company has been trying to sell the same thing for almost a year now.

[Roamer @ Dec 14th 2007 5:53AM]

Hi hotmail_sucked,

>>This isn't new. My company has been trying to sell the same thing for almost a year now

[Roamer @ Dec 14th 2007 6:41AM]

Hi hotmail_sucked,
sorry, but my first reply wasn´t complete ;-(. Here the complete reply to your message:

>>This isn't new. My company has been trying to sell the same thing for almost a year now.

[Roamer @ Dec 14th 2007 6:47AM]

Hi hotmail_sucked,
am I stupid or what (you don´t have to answer my question ;-), my reply is still incomplete.

My question to you was: Which company was trying what to sell?
TIA
Roamer

[Jean-Charles Prabonneau @ Dec 13th 2007 10:16AM]

That would be great for my Roomba!!

[choochor @ Dec 17th 2007 1:04AM]

this is not new at all. this company has been selling ultra-wideband indoor tracking systems for yrs. http://www.ubisense.net