iLOS: a composable and efficient indoor localization engine

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Humans spend 86% of time indoor and yet people routinely get lost in unfamiliar environments. On one hand, the ability to track humans and assets in indoor environments enables many useful services and applications including navigation, advertisements, tourism, emergency management and response, and location-based business intelligence. MarketsandMarketsTM forecasts the global indoor location market size to grow from USD 7.11 Billion in 2017 to USD 40.99 Billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 42.0% during forecast period. On the other hand, several barriers need to be overcome for wider adoption of indoor positioning technologies, namely, i) lack of unified solutions that work directly out-of-the-box, ii) significant infrastructure expenditure in some solutions, iii) diverse requirements in different vertical markets and iv) low availability of indoor floor plans. Therefore, many revenue streams remain untapped due to the inability to consistently locate and track people and targets indoor at low costs.**Zheng's team has been working in the space of indoor positioning, mapping and navigation for over 5 years with many research publications, several hardware and software prototypes, and MacQuest, a successful mobile app that has been serving the McMaster community since 2015. The accumulated intellectual capital and experiences have ripened for reduction-to-practice and technology transfer.**In the project, we aim to develop, iLOS, an efficient and platform-independent indoor localization software development kit (SDK). As a minimum viable product (MVP), the key components are, i) a composable and resource-aware localization engine, ii) tools for data collection and model generation, and iii) prototype demonstration using the MacQuest app. The technology developed will address Barrier 1) - 3) listed above. Subsequently, a Hamilton, ON based start-up company is envisaged that will refine the technology, develop data analytic features and market the product. The final software product targets third-party developers of indoor positioning systems (IPS) and Location-based Service (LBS) providers.****