Multi-sensors Systems for Ubiquitous Personal Navigation

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Navigation technologies are expanding at a phenomenal rate, especially within the civil community, with devices such as vehicle and personal navigators becoming commonplace within our everyday lives. While vehicle and airborne navigation is a well-established service, personal navigation system (PNS) through smart phones has just started to gain momentum fuelled by the application marketplace proliferation, hardware evolution, and consumer adoption. PNS enables mobile location based services (LBS) which become pervasive and are embedded in many applications such as social networking, resource tracking and positioning people . Global Positioning System (GPS) based navigation devices are the dominant solution for these applications. However, GPS signals are not always available and this poses a great deal of challenge for GPS signal-denied environments such as dense urban canyons, under tree canopy and deep indoors. Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology combined with the miniaturization of electronics have empowered the deployment of multiple sensors into a new generation of navigation devices in the mass consumer market. In many smart phones, for example, inexpensive MEMS-based inertial navigation sensors, magnetometers, and barometers are embedded to enable gaming and entertainment applications. Nevertheless, the gains in cost and size come with a price in terms of navigation accuracy. MEMS sensors have much larger error characteristics than their higher grade counterparts meaning that the integration strategy is paramount to the success and accuracy of these sensors. Furthermore, human movement makes personal navigation different and challenging from other navigation platforms (such as for cars, trains, boats, etc.): Personal navigation implies frequent changes of speed and orientation and position cannot be constraint to predefined tracks as for cars and trains. Mobile devices, by definition, are handheld in a position that is difficult to be predicted; various application modes alter frequently depending on user's activities such as walking, driving, running etc. The goal of this research is to address and solve the above challenges, and provide a multi-sensor assisted solution for ubiquitous, continuous, reliable, and seamless techniques for Personal Navigation using sensors currently exist in next generation smart phones.