Indoor Positioning System - Applicability and Precision

Applicability and Precision

Due to the signal attenuation caused by construction materials, the satellite based Global Positioning System (GPS) loses significant power indoors affecting the required coverage for receivers by at least four satellites. In addition, the multiple reflections at surfaces cause multi-path propagation serving for uncontrollable errors. These very same effects are degrading all known solutions for indoor locating which uses electromagnetic waves from indoor transmitters to indoor receivers. A bundle of physical and mathematical methods are applied to compensate for these problems.

With detailed reading in the marketing documents and even in the specifications served by many of the IPS vendors, the interested customer will look for details on precision, reproducibility and other terms for quality of function with little success. Many vendors do not even tangle with the term accuracy.

Read more about this topic:  Indoor Positioning System

Famous quotes containing the word precision:

    We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)