NSF Award
1214461
This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is developing a smart phone application that creates indoor maps through crowd-sourcing and data fusion technologies. Commercial and enterprise applications require indoor maps to support accurate location calculations and location display. In this project a global indoor map database is created though the contribution of a community of volunteers or any team that is interested in collaboratively creating indoor maps of a building, campus or city. The individuals will have a mobile app on their smart phone. As they walk through indoor spaces the application automatically creates a map using motion sensors in the phone by detecting building features such as hallways, stairways, and elevators based on the users motions. The technical challenge is to merge and fuse sensor data coming from many users carrying commercial cellular devices to incrementally update a global map of indoor spaces. The commercial challenge is to deliver an enabling technology for a broad spectrum of location-based applications. The proposed solution will provide the following: <br/>- Global data base of indoor spaces <br/>- Mapping API for mobile app developers to access to indoor maps <br/>- Map intelligence about patterns of pedestrian movement for third party companies<br/><br/><br/> The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is the ability to create the indoor maps of navigable passageways that are required for a broad array of enterprise and consumer applications without requiring professional survey teams or enterprise involvement to deliver the mapping data. The TRX solution will significantly reduce the cost and time of creating and updating maps and will increase the availability of indoor mapping data. TRX will use these maps to deliver mapping data for indoor location systems to support location calculations and display users or other information inside buildings. Application developers will include providers of software to consumers, urban planners, law enforcement, first responders, and retailers. Companies interested in our mapping application will include both location-based services companies and dedicated mapping application providers: (1) Infrastructure-based Navigation providers: Navteq (Nokia subsidiary) has enabled a mobile indoor navigation system for airports by installing antennas throughout the building. Qualcomm is developing a similar Wi-Fi based solution. These solutions count on maps provided by the enterprise. (2) Indoor Map creators: Point Inside and Micello are manually creating indoor maps of important buildings by converting floor plan images into interactive maps. Again this requires enterprise involvement for establishment and maintenance.
