Smartphone-based Pedestrian Localization and Navigation

Dear Colleagues,

A spectacular growth of indoor localization solutions has been witnessed during the last decade. Many different positioning approaches exist; some of them do not require the specific addition of sensors in indoor spaces (e.g., those using existing WiFi access points), but others require the use of natively-designed beacons for localization (such as UWB, ultrasound, infrared, pseudolites, etc.). We strongly believe that for many practical applications it is an excellent idea to localize persons by just making use of already existing infrastructure in buildings (WiFi AP, BLE tags, etc.) as well as, other signals available from the embedded sensors in a smartphone (magnetic, inertial, pressure, light, sound, GNSS, etc.). This smartphone-based unmodified-space approach has significant practical benefits, such as ubiquity, low cost, as well as being a constantly-updated technology (growing number of AP, improved smartphones, etc.).

This Special Issue invites authors to submit new research results and developments in the area of smartphone-based localization and navigation. We seek solutions that rely on the use of some of the typical internal sensors available in modern smartphones (inertial, magnetic, pressure, light, sound, temperature, humidity, GNSS, proximity, camera, signal strength from existing WiFi or BLE infrastructure, etc.), without having to deploy any ad hoc or specifically installed beacons in the indoor space or building. Different localization challenges could be addressed, such as the natural handling of the phone in the hands of the users, changing positioning or orientation of the phone, processing of signals of opportunity for action recognition or position determination, attenuation of magnetic perturbations with robust AHRS, navigation along stairs/elevators, fingerprinting from sparse training sets, and so on. Apart from new research solutions and ideas, we also welcome works dealing with the evaluation and comparison among different smartphone-based approaches, and even the analysis of past competition results.

Dr. Antonio R. Jiménez
Guest Editor

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