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G. Retscher:
"Research in the Field of Indoor and Pedestrian Navigation at the Research Group Engineering Geodesy at the Vienna University of Technology";
Poster: 24. IUGG General Assembly, Perugia; 2007-07-02 - 2007-07-13.

Within the last decade navigation systems have become popular in the Western World. Especially in outdoor environments location-based services (LBS) play an important role for supporting the wayfinding process. Vehicle drivers have started to trust in the information provided by car navigation systems and even pedestrians are gaining interest in reliable guiding instructions. Most of the available systems on the market, however, are limited to outdoor areas, whereas wayfinding within buildings has mostly been neglected so far. Merely some museums and exhibitions offer digital guiding services to their customers. Even though the range of some positioning sensors may be sufficient for navigation tasks, they are rarely available within buildings and hardly fulfil the minimum conditions concerning cost. In a first stage in our research avaiable indoor location systems have been analyzed and their performance was investigated. Because of the expensive infrastructure for some of these systems, however, the user has to expect high costs when using the system. One approach to reduce costs is the use of already availabel wireless infrastructure such as Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). Such a positioning system has been installed in an office building of the Vienna University of Technology and can be employed for location determination of user´s which are equipped with a WLAN enabled mobile device. In a second step the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags at selected known points, so-called active landmarks, is currently investigated. Then the user can be located using cell based positioning if he is in the read range of such a tag. Currently the deployment of such a concept in our office building and in the surrounding outdoor environment is investigated. In addition, a combination with WLAN and dead reckoning shall be performed in the near future.

Project Head Georg Gartner:
Fußgängernavigation in Gebäuden und im städtischen Umfeld

Project Head Georg Gartner:
Ubiquitäre Kartographie für Fußgängernavigation