Indoor waypoint navigation via magnetic anomalies

A wide assortment of technologies have been proposed to construct indoor navigation services for the blind and vision impaired. Proximity-based systems and multilateration systems have been successfully demonstrated and employed. Despite the technical success of these technologies, broad adoption has been limited due to their significant infrastructure and maintenance costs. An alternative approach utilizing the indoor magnetic signatures inherent to steel-frame buildings solves the infrastructure cost problem; in effect the existing building is the location system infrastructure. Although magnetic indoor navigation does not require the installation of dedicated hardware, the dedication of resources to produce precise survey maps of magnetic anomalies represents a further barrier to adoption. In the present work an alternative leader-follower form of waypoint-navigation system has been developed that works without surveyed magnetic maps of a site. Instead the wayfarer's magnetometer readings are compared to a pre-recorded magnetic "leader" trace containing magnetic data collected along a route and annotated with waypoint information. The goal of the navigation system is to correlate the follower's magnetometer data with the leader's to trigger audio cues at precise points along the route, thus providing location-based guidance to the user. The system should also provide early indications of off-route conditions. As part of the research effort a smartphone based application was created to record and annotate leader traces with audio and numeric data at waypoints of interest, and algorithms were developed to determine (1) when the follower reaches a waypoint and (2) when the follower goes off-route. A navigation system utilizing this technology would enable a low-cost indoor navigation system capable of replaying audio annotations at precise locations along pre-recorded routes.