Ubiquitous Positioning Solutions for Pedestrian Navigation

In a new research project called “Ubiquitous Cartography for Pedestrian Navigation (UCPNAVI)” at the Vienna University of Technolgy we want to explore the capabilities of providing location based information and navigation via a ubiquitous environment to enhance route guiding in smart environments. The hypothesis that ubiquitous cartography, defined as a “technological and social development, made possible by mobile and wireless technologies, that receives, presents, analyses and acts upon map data which is distributed to a user in a remote location”, enables customized route guiding with various presentation forms and therefore optimizes the wayfinding process. Smart stations (in terms of active and short-range devices) can substitute or complement traditional positioning and information transmission methods by sending information or coordinates of the station instead of trying to locate the user by a central server-based solutions. Different techniques and sensors will be tested and a knowledge-based multi-sensor fusion model will be developed to enhance location determination in smart environments. In this paper the positioning of a mobile user in indoor and urban environment based on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) in combination with WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks) and Dead Reckoning (DR) is investigated. The concept of RFID positioning in different case studies and a simulation study for the integration of RFID with WLAN is presented.