Positioning of mobile devices and objects is a core problem in emerging computing systems, such as wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing environments. Most commonly this problem is addressed with external infrastructure installed in the system's environment to acquire and manage position and location information. This project, in contrast, will investigate relative positioning of mobile objects to determine their spatial arrangement free of surrounding infrastructure.

We propose an approach wherein spontaneously networked mobile objects perform collaborative sensing and communication to collectively determine their relative positions and spatial arrangement. The project will engage with the fundamental research challenges that such an approach implies: how to obtain relative position in ad hoc systems, how to reason about dynamic spatial arrangements, and how to provide application support across different domains. Our research method is experimental systems engineering: building and deploying prototype systems for application experiments in the real world.

Relative positioning enables a wide range of applications with largely varying requirements. We assume that there is no 'single best' technology option and will assess a range of candidate technologies with respect to factors such as accuracy, robustness, scalability, cost, and fitness for different application settings. This is complemented with application-driven investigation focussed on three concrete settings: environmental sensor networks, indoor spatial awareness, and multi-device interactive systems.