Infrastructure-Independent Indoor Localization and Navigation

Abstract

In the absence of any global positioning infrastructure for indoor environments, research on supporting human indoor localization and navigation trails decades behind research on outdoor localization and navigation. The major barrier to broader progress has been the dependency of indoor positioning on environment-specific infrastructure and resulting tailored technical solutions. Combined with the fragmentation and compartmentalization of indoor environments, this poses significant challenges to widespread adoption of indoor location-based services. This article puts aside all approaches of infrastructure-based support for human indoor localization and navigation and instead reviews technical concepts that are independent of sensors embedded in the environment. The reviewed concepts rely on a mobile computing platform with sensing capability and a human interaction interface (“smartphone”). This platform may or may not carry a stored map of the environment, but does not require in situ internet access. In this regard, the presented approaches are more challenging than any localization and navigation solutions specific to a particular, infrastructure-equipped indoor space, since they are not adapted to local context, and they may lack some of the accuracy achievable with those tailored solutions. However, only these approaches have the potential to be universally applicable.