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

Avideh Zakhor: I live in Berkeley, and I’ve been living there for 30 years. 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. You also don’t know which one of the many routes available to you has an accident, a slowdown, or too many other people going on it.

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, images, and data about our surroundings. Whether or not we know it, and whether or not we like it, we’re doing that unconsciously all the time.

Through crowdsourcing, 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 are accelerometers, gyroscopes, barometers, thermometers, Wi-Fi signals, Bluetooth, and all kinds of RF signal gathering capability.

I hate to say it, but a lot of it is 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. Just having more information is always useful.

The other positive thing in terms of knowing where you are and 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 on 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.