Semiautomatic Indoor Positioning And Navigation With Mobile Devices

Increasing population density and rapid urbanization lead to an explosive growth of multifunctional, complicated, and comprehensive buildings. Within these buildings, people often have difficulty to locate themselves and get to their destinations. Although real-time navigation outdoors has been widely applied, it is not the case indoors due to lack of feasible or affordable positioning technologies.Instead of a thorough solution, an alternative approach is proposed to indoor positioning and navigation in this paper. This approach is physically based on a mobile device, such as a smart phone, equipped with gyroscope and accelerometer. First, accessible space of a building is represented with a three-dimensional network, based on which, all kinds of points of interests are located spatially. All these information is preloaded onto the mobile device as the spatial reference of positioning and navigation. Second, initial input from a user is used to figure out its current location, as the origin of navigation, and then the approach can generate an optimal path based on user’s destination. While the user moves along the path, its linear displacement can be calculated with gyroscope and accelerometer in real time, and further matched onto this path as user’s current location. Accordingly, real-time guiding information can be delivered to users as outdoor navigation. This approach has been implemented in an Android device. Data are created from a building in the real world, and a series of experiments are conducted to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach.To testify the efficiency of the method of an economical approach to semiautomatic indoor positioning and navigation, an application based on an android phone was completed and experiments based on the college building were conducted. We create the three-dimensional network of the building, and then combine the technology of QR code to store location information in manmade landmarks and to get the locality by scanning the QR code during navigation process. Finally we apply the method to navigate from current position to desired place. The results were evaluated and show good navigation performance.