Navigation Based on Sensors in Smartphones

Abstract

With the increasing ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, users are now routinely carrying a variety of sensors with them wherever they go. These devices are enabling technologies for ubiquitous computing, facilitating continuous updates of a user's context. They have built-in MEMS-based accelerometers for ubiquitous activity monitoring and there is a growing interest in how to use these together with gyroscopes and magnetometers to build dead reckoning (DR) systems for location tracking. Navigation in complex environments is needed mainly by consumer users, private vehicles, and pedestrians. Therefore, the navigation system has to be small, easy to use, and have reasonably low levels of power consumption and price. The technologies and techniques discussed here include the fusion of inertial navigation (IN) and other sensors, positioning based on signals from wireless networks (such as Wi-Fi), image-based methods, cooperative positioning systems, and map matching (MM). The state-of-the-art of MEMS-based location sensors and their integration into modern navigation systems are also presented.