I think an acquisition would be unfortunate. This could become really huge / useful to the world without being locked up as a private company's IP. Personally I would license it rather than sell it, as well as offering offline apps and limited SaaS. You don't need an established enterprise to sell it commercially; you just need a sexy product and some industry vets with contacts. If you do end up going that way, and need someone in IT Ops / DevOps / SysEng stuff to work on the "going enterprise with a billion users", give me a shout.
Drift is one issue but the other gremlins also cause problems with repeatability: initial localization errors (wrong aisle), electromagnetic environment change (wifi strength is not static), physical environment change (if using optical or lidar).
I think this page is a nice intro to the wifi localization space and the website has an exciting tech startup vibe. But I think if you want to really capture the undivided attention of my peers: find a clear, compelling way to demonstrate that it’s robust and repeatable. For example, walk the same real-world space twice a day for a month, stitch together the tracks in a time lapse, and promise you haven’t cherry picked the results. Especially important is demonstrating this in areas with long, repetitive aisles (grocery stores, hardware stores, warehouses, etc.) That would go far! Good luck on being acquired!
Just someone changing the angle of an antenna or shifting a pile of stock near the router has to have a pretty big impact on signal strength.
And obviously a WiFi system upgrade where all the Mac addresses change must be a fairly big change and effectively gives a full service outage for all the users till you remap.
If they re-fit the WiFi, which they might spend a month doing once every 5-10 years, it would need a re-survey, which could take 1-2 hours. But thankfully no new infrastructure.
Incidentally, the devices you metion are what i also use to develop, because those line of products actually behave as they should, per documentation. But most bugs and crashes always come from budget and no name devices because both the hardware and firmware is crap
Sensors that are actually a lot better than standard offerings would also be subject to and/ofs of ITAR or EAR or MTCR or local equivalents thereof, so progress in IMU appears to have been stagnating a bit due to that issue. Sony Semiconductor Solutions had a Arduino IDE compatible clustered IMU board that they say you can see rotation of Earth in data, they ended up selling it with scary warnings and without any of the cool stuffs.
The ITAR stuff is way more fun though. It's great to read between the lines for the intended customer in the datasheet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
It can combine several inaccurate sources and output a result that is more accurate than any one of them.
I was at an Amazon Fresh grocery store, and saw squares in the ceiling that look like QR codes. I guess that's how they are mapping the store.
Is the constraint more about infrastructure (installing anchors, device compatibility, power) or something else that made you lean towards WiFi + SLAM fusion instead?
We have around 300 hours of ground-truth data now, in 1-second intervals, which we use for algorithm training and refinement. The same as performing a survey, our team marks their location on the map, then walks to the next location, and through post-processing we can correct any errors and interpolate the locations in between. You can see this process in the diagram with the large black dots, where the user marked their location.
I am curious how deeply you have had to study the impact of how busy the store is with your signal error? Considering that humans are bags of water which is quite detrimental to RF signals, my guess is that your error increases along with the density of people.
I guess you must use the constraints on the directions a person can walk imposed by the shelves and other structures to give you orientation of the accelerometers. Which in turn means the person doing the ground truth mapping must walk down every aisle, and into every gap. That's not so difficult if your staff are doing it, but I bet you have trouble training the store staff gathering that data to do it well.
Best of British.
To answer your point: we have the digital map, can use that to understand obstacles etc in the space. In some of those larger stores you see in the visual, we typically survey the entire store within 2-3 hours, it's low-effort work, not a blocker.
https://kinexon.com/products/kinexon-rtls was what was used.
I wonder how much better this does than CCC's attempts at indoor navigation for their conferences. Those are usually pretty fun to read about.
It’s the Built for simple campus navigation video.
I’d recommend converting it to SDR.
This would allow an employee to do several stores in a town in a single day. And potentially less chance of a workers-compensation claim being filed if they fall down while walking around looking at their device.
Of course, there's a good bit of magic within all of that to make it work seamlessly.
The thing is: that would require additional hardware though, whereas the relevant limiting criterion of the project presented in the article is obviously that it has to run with just the hardware provided by common mobile phones. Which is what makes the project interesting despite the comparatively lower precision.
Things that would absolutely be an amazing QOL improvement for any shopper. But they won't let you have it because they WANT you to bumble your way around a shop. They don't want you to know where things are. That's why they move shelves around seemingly at random.
If you find a product's page, there's an "other items on this shelf" section which shows items that are located next to it. It's probably not intended to help you locate things, but it's incredibly helpful for it.
Adds way more things for you to notice and tell you're in the right location. Same haystack, more needles.
Peoples at x, y (lat, lng) ain't the same when placed them in multiple floors?
You'd think they would add this information to openstreetmap then or at least put a map on their website (and put it in the public domain so others like OSM can add it to their maps). Or put it in the store so people can take a picture. I go into target and there are posters saying to install an app for maps. Put the map on the poster!
> and they could pop up relevant promotions along the way
Oh, right, they don't want to provide information. They want to track people and spam them.
But it seems instead of stores simply depending on the sale, they also now demand impulse purchases, which mean they want you wandering the store looking in multiple places for your quarry: the casino model. So if they delight a customer with direct route to the sale, they need to make up that windfall elsewhere?S
So they fall back on surveil, profile, and market plus selling your profile to others? Is this is why we can't have nice things?
1/ they need to collect ground truth data for their algorithm to work, it doesn't magically work everywhere.
2/ the ground truth data was collected mostly by their clients, it is not their data to give away for free
Yes, they mention promotions, but again the promotions would be opt-in – if I use their app to find a product I'm looking for, they might suggest other products along the way that I might also find useful, or they might take me in a route that passes right by them. This is no different to the way retailers stock up their shelves already, placing products next to others you might want, and moving necessity items around when they want to direct you to another part of the store.
I don't know, I think it's a bit harsh to criticise this when the technology has so many applications outside of retail. I would love this in a museum or library, and even in retail I absolutely hate those interactive map displays that modern shopping malls have, where only one person can use them at a time and you have to navigate through 200 store names for the one you actually want to visit
Edit: In Target's case, they do apparently also put it on their website if you go hunting for it, but the ubiquitous pushing of apps is still annoying vs just putting it right there in the store as well, and perhaps offering a QR code + text link to the online version. They're clearly using it as bait to install their tracking/ads trojan. Also their online map for my store is east-west inverted for some reason (the east end of the building is on the left, the north on top), which would be immediately obvious if they mapped it to their building in OSM.
(1) It's clear from the use of quotes that the person you're replying to did read the article.
(2) from the official HN Guidelines[0]: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
It tells me how many are in stock, aisle number, and bay number. No need for an app or walking advertisements.