Indoor Path Planning Using Magnetic Positioning

Abstract

Precise positioning in indoor environments faces different challenges than outdoor ones. The attenuation of satellite signal indoors has triggered the development of a wide range of indoor positioning systems. There are many different approaches to successfully locate users or objects in indoor environments like hospitals, universities or shopping centers. Most of them uses radio frequency or ultrasonic systems. In this thesis, the indoor user’s location has been determined based on the unique magnetic field created inside buildings. Using this magnetic positioning, there is no extra hardware implementation required, reducing the development and maintenance budget. Given this position, a full indoor guidance system has been created and implemented in a mall, computing the route from user's position to the desired goal with a path planning algorithm based on Voronoi nodes. This system has been implemented on an Android application where the user can choose any indoor goal, by a list of preset possible goals, or any outdoor place. When the current position and goal are known, the path planning algorithm computes the best route and it is displayed on the smartphone. This work has been joined in a bigger project where indoor and outdoor guidance were combined, so the final application is able to guide the user both indoors and outdoors. The indoor-outdoor transition detection has been made by another partner and has also been integrated into the final app. In conclusion, the aim of this thesis has been to prove magnetic positioning as a valid tracking system in a fully indoor and outdoor guidance system developed for Android.