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(Adam Hoover) My name is Adam Hoover, and I am an associate
professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Clemson University. My research
is in tracking systems. Specifically, I am working on something that we call a local
positioning system. The idea is I want to put the GPS inside a building. So the GPS,
or global positioning system, has been around for about 30 years. Thirty years ago, it was
very inaccurate, very bulky. It was this huge thing started by the military.
Today, you can get GPS in a watch, or you can have it in your car in a small device,
or you can carry it around while backpacking. We have a similar technology today in terms
of its infancy. It is called ultra wideband technology. This is a radio frequency that
allows us to basically see through walls – see through walls, furniture, people, so that
we can start to get signals of where things are inside a building. Unfortunately, though,
it is in its infancy, just like GPS was 30 years ago.
So what we are working on here in my lab is investigating ways to take those signals and
figure out how to triangulate, how to reduce the noise in the signals, how to build small
packages where we can do tracking inside a building, down to perhaps even centimeter-level
accuracy: Where are you, where are things.