Proposed Bachelor Project:
Indoor Positioning System (IPS)
based on the use of a
Wearable Device with Accelerometers
Contractor:
NISlab & Geomatikk / HIG
Contact Person:
Patrick Bours & George Preiss
Working title:
Indoor Positioning System (IPS) based on the use of a Wearable Device with Accelerometers.
Description:
A person can determine his position using a Global Positioning System (GPS) when he is outside. A GPS system uses satellites to determine its position. However, when these satellites
are out of reach, for example inside a building, this system can no longer be used. Indoor a
person can use a so called Inertial Navigation System (INS) which is a navigation system that
uses no external sources to determine its location. After an initial determination of the position, the system can keep track of its location by using its previous location and the advances
from that position. An INS normally uses accelerometers and gyroscopes for accurately determining the advances from the previous location.
In this project the students will need to build an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) which will
keep track of the location of a person inside a building. In order to do so, a wearable device
containing accelerometers will be used (so no use of gyroscopes). Such a device measures
acceleration in 3 directions, which can be translated in movement in three directions. Due to
errors in the measurement of the acceleration and the lack of the gyroscopes there will be an
error in the position of the person. This error should be as small as possible under the given
circumstances. The use of a map of the building can help to reduce this error. We know for
example that people cannot pass through walls and will not even walk into them. When a person is moving from one room to another he will use a door. A building contains some static
obstacles like for example walls but also many dynamic obstacles like tables and chairs.
These dynamic obstacles also restrict the possible movements of a person, but the location of
those objects is not fixed and might change over time.
The students will be given a wearable device for measuring the acceleration and they need to
build an electronic map of one of the buildings of HIG (e.g. the B-building). The wearable
device will be a mobile phone (HTC diamond touch) and the students need to program that
device in order to get access to the data from the accelerometers. An SDK will be provided
for this. The acceleration data will be transmitted via Bluetooth to a PC where the data will be
processed and translated into the position of the person on the map. Instead of Bluetooth the
students can use any other wireless communication device which is available in the phone and
in the PC.
The goal of this project is to build a first version of this application that keeps track of one or
more users as best as possible, i.e. it should reduce the uncertainty about the location of the
user as much as possible. On the PC it should show the map of the building and the possible
locations of the person walking with the mobile phone. A future version of this application
would not transfer the acceleration data from a mobile phone to a PC but would process that
data inside the mobile phone which would also contain the map.
List of tasks:
• Build an electronic map of the B-building (one or more floors);
• Access the accelerometer data from the mobile phone;
• Build a tool that transmits data from a mobile phone to a PC;
• Translate acceleration data into positioning data plus error values such that the errors
are as small as possible;
• Use information from the map to reduce the error even further;
• Demonstrate the usability of the application.
Students:
This is a project for 3 or 4 students, including one student from Geomatikk for building the
electronic map of the B-building. The other students are from IMT. The students need to have
some general programming experience, preferable have experience with Bluetooth or another
wireless communication protocol. Furthermore the students preferably need to have some
affection with mathematics, needed for the transformation from the acceleration data into positioning data.