Pedestrian navigation systems in indoor/outdoor environments

Pedestrians have often ways in unfamiliar urban environments or in complex buildings. In these cases they need guidance to reach their targets. The goal of location-based mobile services is to provide such guidance on demand (anywhere, anytime), individually tailored to the actual information needs, and presented in preferred forms. This project is focusing on the information content and usability aspect of location-based services, i.e., on the user`s task at hand, and the necessary support for his or her route decisions. Specifying a task ontology will yield context- dependent activities, conceptualizations, and references to directions from the user`s perspective. These specifications will (1) require to integrate appropriate sensor data when and where needed, (2) propose criteria and models of routes, fitting to partly conflicting interests and goals, and (3) allow to select appropriate communication methods in terms various multimedia cartography forms. These three work packages are sufficiently disjoint, but complete each other to a whole. The overall research hypothesis is that requirements of pedestrians for a navigation service can be met by formal specifications and an integration of current technology. The hypothesis will be investigated in three directions: integrated positioning, multi-criteria route planning, and multimedia route communication. To test and demonstrate the formal models this project takes a use case scenario - guiding visitors to institutes of the Vienna University of Technology. At the end there shall be a prototypical implementation of the formal models that guides pedestrians who are unfamiliar with the place through the urban environment of the university and the buildings of the university to specific institutes. The use case is easily adaptable to many real services, like guidance to the local authorities of a city, or to specific flights in an airport. Navigation services increase the mobility of the citizen, improve the quality of mobility of tourists and travellers, and offer new business fields for spatial information. However, such existing services suffer from user-friendlyness and reliability. The drawbacks of existing services are due to many reasons, among them the lack of ubiquitous positioning methods, the lack of appropriate data and data integration methods, and the lack of route communication with low cognitive workload. We will compare and evaluate our models with available pedestrian navigation services to prove our hypothesis.

With the results of the project "NAVIO" key challenges of pedestrian navigation in mixed indoor/outdoor environments have been analysed and fundamental steps towards applicable pedestrian navigation systems within Location Based Services (LBS) have been created. The key challenges which have been analysed include continuously positioning techniques; modelling pedestrian movements outdoor, indoor, through underground or passages - generally, in more complex space than 2D networks; communicate route information with various presentation forms. In the work package "Integrated Positioning" it could be shown that a reliable, continuous positioning determination of a pedestrian can be achieved, if different location sensors such as GPS and dead reckoning are combined. The achievable positioning accuracy is thereby in the range of a few metres in combined indoor and outdoor urban environments. In the work package "Modelling" a formula for calculating risk in outdoor and indoor areas could be achieved. This risk is defined as the risk of getting lost on a path. Following the calculated least risk path in a street network minimizes the risk of failing the destination. The assignment of the work package "Cartographic Communication" was to select appropriate communication methods in terms of supporting the user guiding by various multimedia cartography forms. It could be stated, that graphical coded presentation forms, especially maps, help to build the most appropriate mental image, which is needed to solve navigation tasks. The less self-dependent decision has to be made, the more abstraction is possible and the more other presentation forms of routes, e.g. voice commands, are possible. It can therefore be stated, that with the contributions in terms of integration of location sensors and seamless transition of positioning between indoor and outdoor areas; ontological modeling of navigation tasks, deriving well founded criteria and optimization strategies in route selection; and models for context-dependent communication modes of route information; general improvements in (pedestrian) navigation services have been created, which are fundamental and useful for the quick developing navigation services market.