ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Pedestrian navigation and guidance services require positioning and tracking of a mobile user with a certain positioning accuracy and reliability. Navigating in urban areas is an especially challenging task as pedestriansmove in spaceswhere none of the knownpositioning techniqueswork continuously in standalone mode and the movement is in a much more complex space than 2D networks (i.e., on pedestrian paths and along roads, outdoor and indoor, through underground passages, etc.). To solve this challenging task of continuous position determination, a combination of different location technologies is required. Starting from an analysis of existing navigation systems and location-based services (LBS), the characteristics of different sensors employed for positioning are investigated in this paper. The sensors will be classified and the most suitable ones for guidance and navigation services will be selected. For pedestrian navigation systems suitable location technologies include GPS and indoor location techniques, cellular phone positioning, dead reckoning sensors (e.g. magnetic compass, gyros and accelerometers) for measurement of heading and travelled distance as well as barometric pressure sensors for height determination. The integration of these sensors in a modern multi-sensor system can be performed using a Kalman filter as this algorithm is particularly suited for real-time evaluation. As a typical usage scenario the guidance of a pedestrian from the nearest public transport stop to our Institute of the Vienna University of Technology will be presented based on simulated observation data. The results of this study could confirm that such a service can achieve a high level of performance for the guidance of a pedestrian in an urban area with mixed indoor and outdoor environment. Finally the design of a prototype is presented which includes all possible system components for position determination in a pedestrian navigation system.
