The 2008 Workshop on Precision Indoor Personnel Location and Tracking for Emergency Responders will be held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute August 4-6. This year, four solutions for precisely locating first responders inside buildings will be demonstrated in carefully controlled trials. The testing will take place Aug. 6 and will place available technologies in realistic scenarios under identical conditions.

Systems developed by TRX Systems, ENSCO Inc., L-3 Communications and WPI will be used to locate a firefighter lost in WPI’s electrical and computer engineering building. Homing systems from Summit Safety Inc. and WPI also will be tested.

“This will be a unique opportunity to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of these various technologies under realistic conditions,” said conference chair R. James Duckworth, professor of electrical and computer engineering at WPI. “I don’t think any of the teams really know how well their systems will perform in this difficult test. Of course, the real goal is not to see which systems win or lose, but to gain valuable experience that will allow us to return to the lab and make our systems better, so they can be used to save lives.”