INDOOR NAVIGATION

The intelligent way to pinpoint key locations

How often have you had a hard time locating that new café inside in a bustling shopping center where you were supposed to meet your friends? How often have you wandered the hallways of some office building trying desperately to find that meeting room you were supposed to be in? How convenient would it be to have an app, similar to the ones used outdoors, that works indoors?

INDOOR NAVIGATION deals with navigation within buildings. Since GPS is unreliable in interior spaces because there is no visual contact with the GPS satellites, an IPS (indoor positioning system) must use other positioning methods. These include, for example, the common consumer standards Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), but also solutions based on Ultra-wideband (UWB) or passive RFID. A typical application can be turn-by-turn navigation in an app (displaying directions on a digital map) used for train stations, airport, museums and many other useful services. However, indoor navigation can also be possible without automatic positioning – for example, when a digital building map is integrated into a website or in a digital signage system (multi-touch kiosk/interactive terminal). In this case, no location hardware is required (Wi-Fi, beacons).

Seamless Indoor Navigation Capabilities

Indoor navigation can be used in many different environments. In addition to helping people get to where they want to go, indoor navigation can also provide useful information to building managers, facilities coordinators, and marketing personnel.

Hospitals

• Indoor navigation is very helpful to visitors, patients, and employees to find their destinations in hospitals.
• Turn-by-turn navigation can relieve the stress of navigating the typical labyrinth of hospital hallways, especially in an already stressful or time-sensitive situation.
• Even for hospital staff to find the equipment they need, such as IV pumps and medication carts.

Office buildings

• Finding a conference room, restroom, or desk can be easy with indoor navigation in smart offices.
• In addition to people and places, assets such as printers, tools, or test equipment can be located. Maintenance personnel can find the printer, wiring closet, or HVAC system that needs service.
• Data that IPIN systems gather in an office can be very useful. Facilities administrators can get usage data for conference rooms and desks to optimize space utilization.

University campuses

Universities are starting to deploy smart campus technologies.

• Networked technologies to facilitate collaboration, use resources more efficiently, enhance security, save money, and make the campus a more connected and enjoyable place.
• Indoor navigation helps to create a more personalized campus experience for both students and visitors.

Airports

• Smart airport technologies can greatly improve the customer experience at airports.
• Technology to provide real-time flight information, boarding alerts, indoor navigation, and translation of airport signage into nine languages. It can even tell you when your bags will arrive at baggage claim!

Multi-story car parks

• The same problems with GPS indoors also occur in parking lots. Parking lots at airports, stadiums, and other large venues can cover huge areas with multiple levels, making it a confusing place to navigate—much less remember where the car is parked.
• Indoor navigation can help customers find their way. With the help of some IoT technology, it can even inform a driver of an open parking space and lead them to it.

Shopping malls and large stores

• The obvious use of indoor navigation in malls is to get turn-by-turn directions to a particular store. In large stores, it can lead you to specific products.
• Collecting useful marketing data from indoor navigation systems. For example, how much time do people spend in each store? Most visited areas of the store? With this information,one can make popular items or stores easier to find (or even reconfigure the store layout, based on what people need the most).
• Proximity marketing is also made possible with indoor positioning. People can receive ads directly on their phone that pertain to a store they are near.

A MARKET OUTLOOK

• North America dominated the overall market in 2017, as the U.S. is a major contributor to the Indoor positioning and Indoor navigation market growth in this region. The dominance of this region is primarily due to the availability of advanced connectivity wireless technology and indoor technologies among retail, travel, hospitality, healthcare, and public spaces.
• In addition, Asia-Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth rate during the forecast period due to rise in penetration of indoor Location-Based Services (LBS), connected devices, and Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) market among India and China.

Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) Key Market Segments:

By Component

• Software
• Hardware
• Services

By Technology

• Ultra-Wideband Technology
• Bluetooth Low Energy
• Wi-Fi

By Application

• Asset and Personnel Tracking
• Location-Based Analytics
• Navigation and Maps

Indoor Navigation Anywhere: Is It Beyond Reach?

Mobile outdoor GPS navigation apps have proven to be lifesavers to countless people. With a smartphone in hand, it is easy to find your way to a destination, even in an unfamiliar city. However, it is still easy to get lost indoors, where GPS satellite signals are not accurately traceable for navigation applications.

So, what are the current applicable ideas for indoor navigation? A relatively well-known navigation approach is based on Bluetooth beacon positioning which can roughly work out the device’s location on a map via signals from one or more iBeacons. Based on this, then we can calculate a route and navigate the user to the destination. However, this solution only works in buildings where iBeacons exist and the limited Bluetooth transmission range results in high costs for deployment and maintenance in large-sized indoor environments (shopping malls and office buildings, for instance).

• So, a good alternative can be Indoor Positioning using Wi-Fi.

1. existing Wi-Fi infrastructure can be used
2. enabled Wi-Fi is sufficient
3. large range (up to 150m)
4. detects floor level

Finally, indoor navigation generally relies on indoor maps, but map collection, data representation and manipulation in large-sized indoor spaces are outstanding and costly issues, placing a huge question mark over the universal application of indoor navigation technologies. And for smaller buildings, owners may not have the means to collect and expose the necessary data.

So, how can we achieve low-cost, plug-and-play, scalable indoor navigation?

A Flexible Solution to Indoor Navigation

As more assets and devices move through our world, it’s getting harder to track their exact location – especially indoors.

Instead of doing positioning first, why not focus only on navigation, as that’s our goal? Experiments have determined that the indoor geomagnetic field is disturbed by building structures, and that it is relatively stable inside buildings. This can be an idea of creating an indoor navigation system based on the magnetic sensor data gathered from different locations, while leveraging the other phone sensors to support real time navigation instructions. Once a user goes to an indoor location using the app to record sensor data along a path, any other user can follow that path and get there. As more users collect data, different paths can be combined that make the system even more useful.