Tools for smartphone multi-sensor data registration and GT mapping for positioning applications

Nowadays smartphones have impressive sensing and computation capabilities, allowing the registration and processing of multiple sources of information. This power enables the creation of useful applications, such as seamless location both outdoors and indoors. Research teams pay less interest in standardizing the acquisition and processing of sensor data than to research and innovation tasks, so each group develops its own private software tools to collect data. We want to contribute by creating a framework that allows a more coherent data-stream registration and algorithm performance comparison. In this paper we present an open-source framework to make possible multi-sensor registration, which includes <;monospace>GetSensorData<;/monospace>, our logging Android application. In order to ease the creation and sharing of experiments among different researchers around the world, the framework also includes the data format definition, the data parsers and the procedures to calibrate maps and to define the ground-truth trajectory for subsequent position algorithm performance comparison. Finally, we review applications of these tools in the IPIN competition as well as in teaching activities.