Interior Mapping: Drone Deliveries, Emergency Rescue, and Smart Homes

Avideh Zakhor: I live in Berkeley and I’ve been living there for 30 years and I know
all the streets and how to get to my home and my work.
But I still use Google Maps because at any point in time you don’t know the amount
of traffic between where you are and where you want to go, and which one of the many
routes available to you has an accident or a slowdown or too many other people are going
on.
The value of exterior mapping is I think by now pretty well understood by the public.
Interiors you can argue less about people getting lost and traffic and stuff like that.
But imagine package delivery like Amazon going to deliver our packages through drones all
the way to the exterior of our building.
But then you wanted the last mile of delivering those same things into different offices or
apartments inside a building, and that would also require mapping.
So the idea is to make the interior mapping be seamlessly integrated with exterior mapping
so that you can have true end-to-end connectivity between different points.
All of us, through this amazing device we carry with ourselves, cell phones, are continuously
collecting signals and images and data about our surrounding.
Whether or not we know it and whether or not we like it we’re doing that unconsciously
all the time.
Through crowdsourcing, so if you get the aggregate of all the people who are going into all these
indoor spaces you have the potential to map every indoor space.
The typical cell phone has over 40 sensors.
There’s accelerometers, gyroscopes, barometers, thermometers, Wi-Fi signal, Bluetooth, all
kinds of RF signal gathering capability.
I hate to say it but a lot of it are being tracked because to use a lot of the applications
on your phone you allowed the company that sold you the phone to collect that information.
And that’s almost synonymous with mapping.
So those could be used in order to map the interiors.
These very same people whose crowdsourced data you used to map, you can use that same
information to locate people.
When there is an emergency – either an earthquake, fire or anything like that the first responders
will have a lot easier time knowing where people are and knowing how to rescue people.
And just having more information is always useful.
The other positive thing in terms of knowing where you are iand how many people are where
and knowing the maps is this idea of smart buildings.
You can control the many, many sensors and actuators that are inside the building to
your liking.
So suppose that I like the temperature in my office to be no warmer than 64.
Just because there’s a map and because they know where I am, that I’m not in my office,
there’s not going to be any cold HVAC air being pumped into it.
That saves energy.
And when a day that I’m not working in my office but working in the conference room
across the hall from my office the same temperature preferences can be applied to that room.
Localizing people enables them to be more comfortable and more in tune with the environment
that they’re in.
And it could result in potential energy savings inside buildings if that information is readily
available.

Interior Mapping: Drone Deliveries, Emergency Rescue, and Smart Homes | Avideh Zakhor

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