For humans, knowledge of our own location is a basic kind of empowering information: as part of our mental model of the world, it allows us to navigate to desired places, to find resources, and to plan our movements more effectively. Until recently, people had to rely on experience and continuity to locate themselves. However, in the past decade, cheap position information from the Global Positioning System (GPS) infrastructure has wrought tremendous change in human and robotic activities ranging from military operations (including autonomous aircraft), civilian navigation and surveying, to shipping and supply-chain management, resource exploration, and precision agriculture.
We envision an analogous infrastructure indoors to provide fine-grained location and orientation ("pose") information to hand-held devices, autonomous robots, and ordinary objects. This infrastructure will bring about a revolution in indoor human and robotic activities. For people, pose-awareness will allow direct interaction with things in the world and their metadata. For robots, pose-awareness will enable tasks that would otherwise seem out of reach, such as complex household chores beyond pool-cleaning and vacuuming. I'll also sketch how, as a swarm of small robots, our infrastructure can deploy itself autonomously throughout the environment.