Market Research( Indoor Navigation)

What is Indoor Navigation

You have probably used an Outdoor Navigation app recently, such as Google Maps but what about indoor navigation inside a Large Mall, Hospital, Airport, etc. Indoor Navigation brings these apps & services to indoor spaces, where the GPS does not work. Indoor navigation aims to guide people inside venues.

The diffrence between normal navigation and indoor navigation is that it don’t rely on GPS because it’s accuracy is not good enough, indoor positioning relies on other signals & techniques to provide an indoor location: WiFi signals, Bluetooth iBeacons, inertial sensors, magnetic fields…

Key Parameters for a Indoor Navigation System

Firstly, each indoor positioning system may have different pros & cons. Usually, you would be interested in evaluating at least:

• Accuracy. 1-5 metre accuracy is enough to provide a good navigation experience.
• Investment in infrastructure required. The less, the better.
• Frequency of updates. Obviously, updating your UI every second is better than updating it every minute.
• Stability. Location updates should not be jumpy, otherwise the user may become dizzy! =)
• Ability to detect floor changes automatically. The users should not need to indicate the floor where they are: the app should guess it automatically!

2. Floor detection | 1. Low accuracy (5-20 meters). Unstable.
3. Doesn’t work on iOS. Infrequent location updates in Android >9.
4. Doesn’t provide orientation. | | BLE | 1. Usually requires installing new infrastructure (beacons)
5. Floor detection
6. Relatively Cheap Technology | 1. Low accuracy (5-20 metres) and unstable unless lots of beacons are used.
7. Doesn’t provide orientation. | | Magnetic | 1. Doesn’t require infrastructure * Accurate (1-3 meters)
8. Provides orientation | 1. Doesn’t detect the floor you are (at least robustly & consistently).
9. Very unstable and inconsistent over time. | | Movement estimation | 1. Doesn’t require infrastructure | 1. Doesn’t usually provide the real location, just the user movement/trajectory | | Camera | 1. Doesn’t require infrastructure (or little infrastructure, like QR codes)
10. Accurate (even up to 1 meter)
11. Provides orientation
12. AR Applications | 1. User must point the camera forward. Doesn’t work in the pocket
13. Building & maintaining an image database of the whole building is very effort-consuming
14. May not be robust due to changes in the environment (e.g., people walking around, new elements).
15. Sometimes, distinguishing different areas with the camera may not be possible | | Visible Light Communication | 1. Accurate (1-3 meters). Provides orientation.
16. Provides frequent and stable location updates
17. Floor detection | 1. Requires heavy investment in infrastructure
18. User must point the front camera to the ceiling. Doesn’t work in the pocket. |

Each of them have their disadvantages and quite significant ones

Solution :

The Best starategy might be to use multi sensor : it is possible to take the best of each technique to build a really good indoor positioning and indoor navigation system. We have to use all the sensors like including WiFi, BLE, magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope, and barometer. In Android devices, these solutions can provide positioning without additional infrastructure, by leveraging on the existing WiFi infrastructure (or maybe complementing it with a few beacons in shaded areas). iOS devices do not allow WiFi scanning, so these solutions rely on Bluetooth beacons in this case. Nevertheless, using all the sensor information allows obtaining great results even with a 10% of the beacons that other approaches require, which is a great saving in infrastructure!