Intelligent Geomagnetic Indoor Positioning System

Abstract

In the past, several firefighters have died in disaster relief operations. Although the firefighters were fully equipped, the scene of the disaster was smoky and disorienting, making the firefighters unable to identify their location. The commander wanted to direct the firefighters outside but could not confirm the correct location of the firefighters, causing delays in rescue. GPS cannot support indoor positioning or preset indoor positioning facilities at the moment of fire extinguishing. However, geomagnetism is everywhere, and it can be used to identify one’s location. Unfortunately, due to the uncertainty of the magnetic field strength, indoor geomagnetism is affected by the building environment, and the existing magnetic positioning methods have difficulty obtaining a location. To solve this problem, we propose a new incremental indoor localization scheme based on the difference in geomagnetic intensity. The proposed method achieves indoor localization in 2D environments successfully. The novelty of our geomagnetic indoor positioning system is that it can perform indoor positioning without adding any indoor positioning facilities, and the accuracy can reach 0.8~1.5 m. This article aims to verify that the geomagnetic turbulence filtering algorithm can filter out abnormal geomagnetic intensity, that the incremental algorithm can estimate the position of human motion, and that geomagnetism can be used for indoor positioning without any preset infrastructure. The contribution of this paper is that we have developed a practical system that can be used without any infrastructure and can be used for indoor positioning with meter-level accuracy. The geomagnetic indoor positioning system can be integrated with a wireless network and applied to disaster relief.