Pedestrian navigation systems and location-based services

Pedestrians must often find their way in unfamiliar urban environments or complex buildings. In these cases, they need guidance to reach their desired destination, for example a specific room in a local authority's building, a counter or a department at an university. The goal of location-based mobile services is to provide such guidance on demand (anywhere, anytime), individually tailored to the actual information needs and presented in preferred forms. Thereby the navigation service requires positioning and tracking capabilities of a mobile user with a certain positioning accuracy and reliability. In particular, navigating in urban areas is a very challenging task as pedestrians move in spaces where none of the known positioning techniques works continuously in standalone mode and the movement is in a much more complex space than 2D networks (i.e. on pedestrian paths and along roads, outdoor and indoor, through underground passages, etc.). To solve this challenging task of continuous position determination, a combination of different location technologies is required. The integration of the sensors should be performed such that all the sensors are tightly coupled in the sense of a so-called multi-sensor system. In a new research project in our University entitled "Pedestrian Navigation Systems in Combined Indoor/Outdoor Environments (NAVIO)" we are working on the improvement of such navigation services. The project is mainly focusing on the information aspect of location-based services, i.e. on the user's task at hand and support of the user's decisions by information provided by such a service. Specifications will allow selection of appropriate sensor data and to integrate data when and where needed, to propose context-dependent routes fitting to partly conflicting interests and goals as well as to select appropriate communication methods in terms of supporting the user guiding by various multimedia cartography forms. To test and to demonstrate our approach and results, the project takes a use case scenario into account, i.e. the guidance of visitors to departments of the Vienna University of Technology. First results of our project are presented.