An Overview on Position Location: Past, Present, Future

Prior to the 21st century, positioning technologies had limited applications including air traffic control, air and sea navigation, satellite communications and related military uses. Today, positioning technologies have deeply merged with daily life and enabled many novel sensors, systems and services. For example, navigation systems are the enablers of road traffic prediction, assisted and autonomous driving, and several aspects of healthcare. They have also facilitated worldwide services provided by companies such as Uber and Lyft. In fact, in many aspects of modern life, localization systems are deemed essential to day-to-day living and are contributing to our general well-being, the economy, and security. Accordingly, position location technologies have become key components of many worldwide industries. These positioning technologies include the Global Positioning System (GPS), WiFi-based indoor localization, cell-phone based localization (including the fusion of GPS, cell-tower based localization and dead-reckoning), and inertial/dead-reckoning techniques. Tracking technologies are also considered key components for localization, as are the more recently integrated concepts of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This paper provides a review of the history of localization, the main technological enablers of localization and assesses the future directions of localization methods.