Ubiquitous Cartography for Pedestrian Navigation

In this project, we want to explore the capabilities of providing location based information and navigation via a ubiquitous environment to enhance route guiding in smart environments. We have the hypothesis that ubiquitous cartography, defined as a "technological and social development, made possible by mobile and wireless technologies, that receives, presents, analyses and acts upon map data which is distributed to a user in a remote location", enables customized route guiding with various presentation forms and therefore optimizes the wayfinding process. There is little previous work in this area, and we believe that we are breaking new ground by bringing together a team from engineering geodesy and cartography with a focus on communication of location based information and navigation behaviour of pedestrians. Smart stations (in terms of active and short-range devices) can substitute or complement traditional positioning and information transmission methods by sending information or coordinates of the station instead of trying to locating the user by a central server-based solutions. Different techniques and sensors will be tested and a knowledge-based multi-sensor fusion model will be developed to enhance location determination in smart environments. Furthermore ubiquitous navigational systems can learn from the user`s behaviour and can be responsive to his individual preferences and requirements during the use of the navigation service. In order to adapt the guiding model to the user`s needs, pedestrian route choice behaviour will be analysed and mobility styles will be defined. Additionally the potentiality to directly interact with the smart environment enables annotation of personal preferences or experiences for future visits, which is why techniques of interactivity will be explored and various multimedia data, which could be updated and appended to the system will be investigated concerning their use as Points of Interest and emotional landmark information and will be included in the analysis and development of cartographic methodology for ubiquitous route communication. To test and demonstrate the approach and results this project takes a use case scenario - shopping malls / shopping streets - and develops a final implementation as a proof of concepts. This prototype will allow evaluating and demonstrating the usability of a ubiquitous service, and thus prove our hypothesis.

In order to be able to support pedestrian navigation in a mixed indoor and outdoor environment, like e.g. an urban setting, there are different challenges to be solved. The project "Ubiquitous cartography for pedestrian navigation" successfully investigated some of them, namely the question of which sensors and algorithms can be used to determine the position of a user with a mobile device, the question whether the pedestrian behavior is predictable to some sense as it follows particular patterns and the task of how smart environments can be used to provide adaptive mobile navigation and optimize users` way finding process. For the task of position determination main results include the evaluation of using low-cost active sensors such as "RFID" and "INS". A concept has been implemented and tested in a real world environment. For the combined positioning of RFID and INS an accuracy of around 1.00 m for continuous position determination can be achieved using our approach. Work package 2 aimed at the identification of typical classes of pedestrian spatio-temporal behaviour and related determinants. The results show discriminative behaviour patterns which have been described according to motion-related attributes and core determinants (e.g. interest profiles). These findings can be used for defining behaviour types requiring specific personalised information from navigation services. In the work package "Ubiquitous Cartography", we showed that mobile navigation services in a smart environment can enable users to directly interact with the environment, and thus collect user-generated content (e.g., ratings, comments, feedbacks, moving trajectories) explicitly and implicitly. Based on the UGC, adaptive smart wayfinding supports (e.g., "in similar situation, people similar to you will choose this route") combined with new navigation experiences can be provided to users in mobile navigation services. These adaptive supports can significantly improve the quality of the chosen route and thus optimize the wayfinding process.