An Indoor Autonomous Positioning and Navigation Service to Support Activities in Large-Scale Commercial Facilities

Abstract

In large-scale commercial facilities, location information has much importance for visitor, administrator, and staff of facilities in order to provide various services such as navigation, information inquiry and response, recommendation, marketing analysis, and so on. In particular, indoor positioning and navigation are expected to be useful for visitors of the facilities, and the information of positioning result can be utilized for the analysis of marketing and demand control for the supply side of the commercial facilities. However, it is not easy to achieve indoor positioning and navigation, because there are some crucial problems, for example, it is difficult to apply Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies in indoor environments. In this chapter, we introduce an indoor autonomous positioning and navigation system without using the GPS technology. Some attractive features of the proposed system are that it can work on a smartphone as an application alone without server communications and can provide continuous positioning results. In addition to it, the system is robust against disturbances in real target environments. We have carried out some experiments of the system in a real large-scale commercial facility called Yokohama Landmark Plaza. A result of experiments shows that the positioning result can be obtained with high accuracy and that system can produce continuous positioning results in a robust way against noise and changes of radio wave strength in real environments. These properties will work effectively for providing the services mentioned above.