Wi-Fi Assisted Multi-sensor Personal Navigation System for Indoor Environments

Xing Zhao, Chris Goodall, Zainab Syed, Bruce Wright, Naser El-Sheimy

Abstract:	The paper investigates integrated technologies to leverage the challenges of indoor and urban positioning. Among all the candidates technologies, Wi-Fi positioning has good potentials not only because of its good signal coverage indoors in most urban areas, but also due to its convenient deployment since many consumer products such as smart phones, laptops, PDA etc. have already embedded WiFi modules. In addition, low-cost MEMS sensors and magnetometer sensors also have capabilities to bridge GPS/Wi-Fi signal outages for a reliable solution for indoors personal navigation. These sensors are already embedded in available devices such as smart phones. The Wi-Fi positioning algorithm presented in this paper, derives from channel modeling of radio propagations for indoor environment. In this way, the distance between the user and Wi-Fi access points can be estimated based on the received signal strength. With proper indoor models and threshold testing, this approach can provide reliable ranges without any site pre-surveys. When Wi-Fi ranges are integrated with multi-sensors and GPS using Kalman Filters, the system can render ten-meter accuracies for most indoor environment. The solutions, thus, exhibit good potential for a portable, reliable, accurate and lowcost systems that enables continuous navigation anywhere.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2010 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 25 - 27, 2010 Catamaran Resort Hotel San Diego, CA
Pages:	236 - 243
Cite this article:	Zhao, Xing, Goodall, Chris, Syed, Zainab, Wright, Bruce, El-Sheimy, Naser, "Wi-Fi Assisted Multi-sensor Personal Navigation System for Indoor Environments," Proceedings of the 2010 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Diego, CA, January 2010, pp. 236-243.
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