Design and implementation of an indoor mobile navigation system

Abstract

This thesis describes the design and implementation of CricketNav, an indoor mobile navigation system using the Cricket indoor location sensing infrastructure developed at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science as part of Project Oxygen. CricketNav navigates users to the desired destination by displaying a navigation arrow on a map. Both the direction and the position of the navigation arrow are updated in real-time as CricketNav steers the users through a dynamically computed path. To support CricketNav, we developed a modular data processing architecture for the Cricket location system, and an API for accessing location information. We implemented a least-squares position estimation algorithm in Cricket and evaluated its performance. We also developed a rich and compact representation of spatial information, and an automated process to extract this information from architectural CAD floorplans.