Development of a pedestrian navigation system without additional infrastructures

An indoor navigation service for pedestrians on a campus is important because the layout and structure of buildings on a campus is often complicated and they are spread over a large area. Navigation on a campus can be categorized into three stages: outdoors with the entrance of a targeted building as a destination, and indoors with a targeted floor in the building as a destination, and a targeted room on that floor as a destination. We thus have to perform seamless outdoor and indoor navigations. In this paper, for the goal of seamless navigation, we aim to achieve the third step, i.e., indoor room navigation on a floor. Many conventional indoor navigation systems require additional infrastructure, such as maps or pseudo-satellites, and much additional cost. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a smartphone application for guiding a user to a destination that utilizes numbering patterns for rooms on a floor. The system can be realized without additional infrastructure, even if in a building with few features. To this end, we investigate the relationships between existing room numbering patterns and floor arrangements in campus buildings in twelve Japanese universities. We find that the numbering pattern depends on the aspect ratio of the building´s shape and the building size. We used these trends to develop our application. We also verify our application and the integrity of these proposed mapping rules, even utilizing the application on new floors and buildings that were not in our initial investigation. We obtain an integrity of 90% for floor arrangements that match our defined rules, and achieve sufficient integrity for practical navigation.