CSR demos breakthrough indoor navigation accuracy

Mobile World Congress 2012, BARCELONA, SPAIN: CSR plc is demonstrating one of the industry’s most exciting technological advancements at Mobile World Congress 2012 – highly accurate indoor navigation, made possible by the revolutionary SiRFstarV architecture and SiRFusion location platform.

Using a smartphone containing a pre-production SiRFstarV device and MEMS sensors from STMicroelectronics, CSR and STMicroelectronics will show attendees how this breakthrough self-learning SiRFusion platform “fuses” multiple radio signals, sensor inputs and other location data to make extremely reliable and accurate indoor location and navigation a reality.

“Since we first demonstrated how our innovative MEMS sensors contribute to this unique CSR location technology and platform at CES 2012 in January, we have received inquiries from several of our Tier One customers expressing strong interest in this combined solution,” said Fabio Pasolini, Motion MEMS Division GM, STMicroelectronics. “We are thrilled to be contributing to this exciting live demonstration of a true indoor location and navigation solution that can address the emerging needs of location-enabled applications.”

The STMicroelectronics MEMS sensor module used in the demonstration, is a multi-sensor inertial measurement unit with ten degrees of freedom that combines 3-axis sensing of linear, angular and magnetic motion with pressure readings, which are used to determine elevations, so as to determine the position in multi-story buildings.

“Reliable pedestrian dead-reckoning, which is provided in collaboration with the STMicroelectronics MEMS sensors in this demo, is a critical component that enables our SiRFusion platform to achieve the required order of accuracy when GNSS signals are not available, such as indoors and in urban canyons,” said Kanwar Chadha, CMO for CSR and founder of SiRF. “Today we are providing a glimpse of the future of indoor location and navigation, and demonstrating our vision of enhancing the mainstream consumer experience with a variety of location-enabled services and applications indoors and outdoors, seamlessly.”

The SiRFstarV architecture introduces a new approach to location and navigation. Instead of relying solely on GPS to determine position, the SiRFstarV architecture gathers real-time information from GPS, Galileo, Glonass and Compass satellites, multiple radio systems, such as Wi-Fi and cellular, and multiple MEMS sensors, like accelerometers, gyros and compasses. It then combines this real-time information with ephemeris data, mapping, cellular base station and Wi-Fi access point location data and other cloud-based aiding information using the SiRFusion platform.

To show the power of SiRFusion indoor navigation, a mobile handset containing SiRFstarV and STMicroelectronics MEMS sensors is loaded with indoor applications from Whatamap.com and VisioGlobe. These applications show indoor positioning, search, and walking directions using high quality indoor maps from Navteq and Micello.