Radio Mapping and Positioning with Robust Inertial Navigation

Important results from the project

The goals with the project were to increase the level of automation in the IPS calibration process and increase the robustness of the IPS positioning. The level of automation has been increased by development of a new strategy to the calibration process. The old solution required much manual preparation work, e.g. creation network of walkable paths and definition of calibration paths. In the new solution these steps are omitted. The positioning accuracy has also been improved utilizing the motion sensor data in a better way.

Expected long term effects

With Senion at Work our focus has been shifted towards offices from previously being primarily large shopping malls. The new calibration procedure developed in this project is an important step for optimizing our product for this new market. The new IPS calibration process is based on IMU-integration and has been developed so that it increases the positioning accuracy and decreases the manual preparation work. This will save time in the installation process, and also make it possible to handle more installations in parallel without increasing the labor needs.

Approach and implementation

The project was arranged in three phases: Phase 1: Improved positioning performance in IPS calibration by IMU-integration. Phase 2: Improved mapping of radio environment by using the IMU-integration in a Graph-SLAM framework. Phase 3: Automatic site calibration from IMU-integration paths. The work in the project has been done by two researches at Senion AB, but due to other obligations the project needed to be extended. During the whole project there has been fruitful discussions with other researchers in LINK-SIC and a poster were presented at the LINK-SIC workshop in Linköping.