A Review of pedestrian indoor positioning systems for mass market applications

In the last decade, the interest in Indoor Location Based Services (ILBS) has increased stimulating the development of Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS). In particular, ILBS look for positioning systems that can be applied anywhere in the world for millions of users, that is, there is a need for developing IPS for mass market applications. Those systems must provide accurate position estimations with minimum infrastructure cost and easy scalability to different environments. This survey overviews the current state of the art of IPSs and classifies them in terms of the infrastructure and methodology employed. Finally, each group is reviewed analysing its advantages and disadvantages and its applicability to mass market applications

Advanced Pedestrian Positioning System to Smartphones and Smartwatches

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of pedestrian navigation systems for satellite-denied scenarios. The popularization of smartphones and smartwatches is an interesting opportunity for reducing the infrastructure cost of the positioning systems. Nowadays, smartphones include inertial sensors that can be used in pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) algorithms for the estimation of the user's position. Both smartphones and smartwatches include WiFi capabilities allowing the computation of the received signal strength (RSS). We develop a new method for the combination of RSS measurements from two different receivers using a Gaussian mixture model. We also analyze the implication of using a WiFi network designed for communication purposes in an indoor positioning system when the designer cannot control the network configuration. In this work, we design a hybrid positioning system that combines inertial measurements, from low-cost inertial sensors embedded in a smartphone, with RSS measurements through an extended Kalman filter. The system has been validated in a real scenario, and results show that our system improves the positioning accuracy of the PDR system thanks to the use of two WiFi receivers. The designed system obtains an accuracy up to 1.4 m in a scenario of 6000 m2

Indoor location based services challenges, requirements and usability of current solutions

Indoor Location Based Services (LBS), such as indoor navigation and tracking, still have to deal with both technical and non-technical challenges. For this reason, they have not yet found a prominent position in people’s everyday lives. Reliability and availability of indoor positioning technologies, the availability of up-to-date indoor maps, and privacy concerns associated with location data are some of the biggest challenges to their development. If these challenges were solved, or at least minimized, there would be more penetration into the user market. This paper studies the requirements of LBS applications, through a survey conducted by the authors, identifies the current challenges of indoor LBS, and reviews the available solutions that address the most important challenge, that of providing seamless indoor/outdoor positioning. The paper also looks at the potential of emerging solutions and the technologies that may help to handle this challenge

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

Overview of positioning technologies from fitness-to-purpose point of view

Even though Location Based Services (LBSs) are being more and more widely-used and this shows a promising future, there are still many challenges to deal with, such as privacy, reliability, accuracy, cost of service, power consumption and availability. There is still no single low-cost positioning technology which provides position of its users seamlessly indoors and outdoors with an acceptable level of accuracy and low power consumption. For this reason, fitness of positioning service to the purpose of LBS application is an important parameter to be considered when choosing the most suitable positioning technology for an LBS. This should be done for any LBS application, since each application may need different requirements. Some location-based applications, such as location-based advertisements or Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN), do not need very accurate positioning input data, while for some others, e.g. navigation and tracking services, highly-accurate positioning is essential. This paper evaluates different positioning technologies from fitness-to-purpose point of view for two different applications, public transport information and family/friend tracking

Positioning Techniques with Smartphone Technology: Performances and Methodologies in Outdoor and Indoor Scenarios

Smartphone technology is widespread both in the academy and in the commercial world. Almost every people have today a smartphone in their pocket, that are not only used to call other people but also to share their location on social networks or to plan activities. Today with a smartphone we can compute our position using the sensors settled inside the device that may also include accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, teslameter, proximity sensors, barometer, and GPS/GNSS chipset. In this chapter we want to analyze the state-of-the-art of the positioning with smartphone technology, considering both outdoor and indoor scenarios. Particular attention will be paid to this last situation, where the accuracy can be improved fusing information coming from more than one sensor. In particular, we will investigate an innovative method of image recognition based (IRB) technology, particularly useful in GNSS denied environment, taking into account the two main problems that arise when the IRB positioning methods are considered: the first one is the optimization of the battery, that implies the minimization of the frame rate, and secondly the latencies due to image processing for visual search solutions, required by the size of the database with the 3D environment images

Indoor positioning technology assessment using analytic hierarchy process for pedestrian navigation services

Indoor positioning is one of the biggest challenges of many Location Based Services (LBS), especially if the target users are pedestrians, who spend most of their time in roofed areas such as houses, offices, airports, shopping centres and in general indoors. Providing pedestrians with accurate, reliable, cheap, low power consuming and continuously available positional data inside the buildings (i.e. indoors) where GNSS signals are not usually available is difficult. Several positioning technologies can be applied as stand-alone indoor positioning technologies. They include Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Ultra-Wideband (UWB), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Tactile Floor (TF), Ultra Sound (US) and High Sensitivity GNSS (HSGNSS). This paper evaluates the practicality and fitness-to-the-purpose of pedestrian navigation for these stand-alone positioning technologies to identify the best one for the purpose of indoor pedestrian navigation. In this regard, the most important criteria defining a suitable positioning service for pedestrian navigation are identified and prioritised. They include accuracy, availability, cost, power consumption and privacy. Each technology is evaluated according to each criterion using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and finally the combination of all weighted criteria and technologies are processed to identify the most suitable solution

Indoor location based services market drivers and challenges

Indoor Location Based Service (LBS) applications, such as indoor navigation, have not yet found a prominent position in the market as it deals with many challenges, both technical and non-technical. They include indoor positioning, availability and usability of indoor maps and privacy concerns. If these solved or handled there would be a 10 billion euro market waiting for indoor LBS. There are some upcoming and/or potential solutions and opportunities that may help to handle these challenges. They include new positioning technologies and multi-sensor positioning systems that can be applied for indoors, crowd-source mapping, change in viewpoint regarding the users privacy, standards, regulations and policies that can preserve privacy of LBS users. This paper analyses indoor LBS current markets, the challenges and trends and estimate future growth if theses challenges are handled

Indoor location based services market drivers and challenges

Indoor Location Based Service (LBS) applications, such as indoor navigation, have not yet found a prominent position in the market as it deals with many challenges, both technical and non-technical. They include indoor positioning, availability and usability of indoor maps and privacy concerns. If these solved or handled there would be a 10 billion euro market waiting for indoor LBS. There are some upcoming and/or potential solutions and opportunities that may help to handle these challenges. They include new positioning technologies and multi-sensor positioning systems that can be applied for indoors, crowd-source mapping, change in viewpoint regarding the users privacy, standards, regulations and policies that can preserve privacy of LBS users. This paper analyses indoor LBS current markets, the challenges and trends and estimate future growth if theses challenges are handled