25 January 2009

Indoor Positioning
Nokia Research Center Helsinki

Nokia Research Center in Helsinki has released an interesting new video about the WLAN Based Indoor Positioning!

Indoor positioning applications can be used, for example, for finding friends, family members, and places in complex indoor areas, such as malls or airports.

The technology can be deployed also for tracking material, equipment, and people in industrial solutions.

If you have ever been in a rush to catch your connecting flight in the airport, without knowing exactly where to head than you know how useful this system will be.

Your mobile will be able to show your location inside the building, find the point of interest your searching for and then guide you there. This technology, could even find your friend when it’s time to go home!

The main aim is to develop low-cost and easy-to-deploy solutions that scale from building level accuracy to less than one meter accuracy. Team behind this project working hard on improving the algorithms, software, and hardware for using local wireless systems for positioning and navigation in areas without GPS coverage.

The mobile uses the buildings’ WLAN infrastructure to triangulate your position and then indicates where you are on a building map. Nokia prototypes today can show your location - building section and floor level.

They allow you to browse the building, find points of interest and you can even share your position with the people you choose, when you want. Today Nokia has Indoor Positioning trials ongoing within 40 buildings worldwide.

In order to enable indoor positioning in buildings, the indoor positioning solution requires a list of available WLAN access points and their approximate location in the building.

Based on this list, which often already exist due to network planning, the indoor position is calculated. Nokia is working on and testing algorithms capable of finding your indoor position to within a few meters. Read more about the Nokia’s research projects.