Indoor navigation hardware/software requirements for iOS

Question

I'm developing navigation system for my university as some kind of research activity. I'm using SVGKit to display floor plans. And now I need to provide user locationing service for navigation and tracking. So here's my questions:

1) Do I need some special hardware installed in university (Cisco MSE for example, or some cheaper analogues), or I can apply some software/technologies to our current hardware for server-side user location determining? If I do, what equipment do I need for it? I mean, it would be one unit for the whole university, or one per each floor, or what? 2)

Q: Why doesn't the Redpin iPhone client conform to the iPhone SDK Agreement? A: Apple does not provide a public API to retrieve WiFi data. In order to get the iPhone client working we had to use a private API, which is disallowed by the iPhone SDK Agreement.

(c) http://redpin.org/faq.html

Does it mean that RedPin is unacceptable in AppStore, so I can't use it? 3)Does Navizon I.T.S. requires some specific hardware equipment except standart routers?

Thank you all, maybe you can offer me better solutions, I hope. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Indoor positioning is a very vast field and many different solutions are available which all use a different combination of hardware/software. Some need no specific hardware to work, others need a very expensive infrastructure to be put in place. In the end, it all depends on the accuracy you are trying to achieve. Here are the most common solutions used, I ordered them by the type of technology used:

1. Wifi: two main techniques are used here, trilateration and fingerprinting. Both do not require specific hardware if your uni already has deployed access points (APs). Trilateration converts signal strength to distance and then intersect circles (almost exactly like GPS). In general this has poorish accuracy and you need to know the exact position of APs for it to work. Fingerprinting is a pattern matching technique where you first build a wireless map of the environment and then match the measurement against this map.
2. Bluetooth: same techniques as above can be used with Bluetooth nodes. Of course, there's less Bluetooth nodes than Wifi so you might need to deploy some extra nodes for it to be accurate enough. Same accuracy as Wifi (roughly 5 meters)
3. Dead reckoning: uses an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to calculate the speed of heading of the user. Needs to be initialized and calibrated regularly by another absolute positioning technique. Subject to drift so accuracy degrades quickly over time. Upside is its very cheap, no extra hardware or initial survey phase are needed.
4. UWB: very accurate techniques based on time of flight measurements. Requires expensive hardware for both transmitter and receiver. You can achieve cm accuracy with this but it's probably not what you're after

This is still an field of research so it's not that easy to find something that just works. I suggest contacting the IT department of your university, if they run a Cisco system, I know some of them provide some sort of positioning capabilities but I don't have much details.

As for your iPhone question, any app that accesses the private API to access Wifi measurements will be rejected by the App store, so you won't be able to publish anything that relies on Wifi. You can still use it for research purpose though, you'll just have to figure out the code yourself as there's no official documentation (some unofficial doc is out there though)

Good luck!