Indoor Navigation and IoT

Dear Colleagues,

Indoor navigation has become commonplace and is already used in various sectors. It is used to guide people such as first responders and to improve the shopping experience in malls but also to monitor goods in the logistics industry. It has improved thanks to rapid developments in the necessary sensor technology, such as in the field of wireless technology (UWB, RFID, 5G) and in algorithms, e.g., particle filters and artificial intelligence.

Thus, standard solutions have already been established in some application scenarios. One example is UWB as a positioning technology in the field of logistics. For pedestrian navigation, a fusion of inertial MEMS sensors in smartphones and radio-based position estimates is often used. It is here that fusion algorithms are important. The wide range of available technologies and evaluation or fusion methods allows an individual to focus on the respective application. Deciding which of the technologies or evaluation methods is useful is often difficult because the advantages and disadvantages cancel each other out at different levels.

This is what makes this field so exciting. The deep knowledge of the different technologies and fusion algorithms allows for new and different combinations so that optimizations can be expected again and again for the respective application scenarios. However, further development in this field does not only concern the technology and algorithms but also the question of the generation and use of building plans. How can these be quickly and easily collected, processed and made usable for navigation? How can routing be calculated quickly and how can this be implemented in real time to control the movement flows of material or people in the short term (e.g., evacuation of buildings)? What is the metrological development here for dynamic guidance? How can the fields of application be extended? Which mass fusion approaches already exist? What are the interactions between the building, the building sensors and the user's individual navigation system?

To address these questions, we call for contributions that advance the field of indoor navigation.

Prof. Dr. Harald Sternberg
Prof. Dr. Thomas Willemsen
Guest Editors

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• indoor navigation
• indoor localization
• indoor positioning
• particle filter
• routing graph
• IoT
• 5G-based fusion
• UWB
• MEMS gyros
• indoor map generation
• BIM
• pedestrian dead reckoning