Dead Reckoning: Finding Your Way Inside

Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) are in most portable electronic devices that can connect to a network.  This technology has revolutionized travel.  They essentially eliminated the ability to get lost, assuming the user knows how to operate it.  This technology only really works outside though.  What about when someone wants to know how to navigate inside a building?  Dead Reckoning, or a system that can remember where a device has been in a room/building, could be an answer to this problem. 

Dead Reckoning uses simple mechanical sensors to determine the position of a device.  An accelerometer and gyroscope can sense the acceleration and change in direction of the device.  With this information, the distance traveled over a certain amount of time can be deduced and a position can be calculated using this information.  The implications for this technology are limitless. 

When asked about the potential uses of this technology, Ron Pulvermacher, President of Matrix Product Development, said that Dead Reckoning could be extremely useful for fire fighters and military personnel.  When a fire fighter enters a burning building, it is often difficult to find the safe path that was taken in to get out due to the smoke and debris.  A Dead Reckoning system could map out the path taken in and relay that information back to the fire fighter to make sure that he or she finds the path back out.  The same goes for military personnel.  Any building entered by military personnel can be easily exited by giving a retrace of their steps.

This technology may be a few years away, but in the future, dead reckoning will be in people’s daily lives just like GPS did when it first came out on the market.