Android App Indoor Navigation Example

Indoor Navigation is a frequently analyzed topic in past and present research studies. One reason for this popularity is the fact that more and more robots conquering our households and for intelligent behavior, it is necessary for them to know where they are and where they can get. In today’s solution, additional hardware called “lighthouses” are commonly used to guide household robots such as robot vacuum cleaner back to their base station. However, for a more intelligent behavior, mobile robots should be able to locate themselves on their own with a minimum of preceding configurations and without the need of additional hardware components. Since GPS doesn’t work indoors, most of the approaches use electromagnetic waves combined with the path loss model to calculate the distance to the emitter of a signal. Moreover, one of the preferred techniques to do so is WiFi based on the standard 802.11. Most modern buildings have multiple WiFi base stations installed, it is therefore possible to use existing infrastructure to make indoor navigation possible. The following code is a practical implementation of an indoor navigation system based on the received signal strength (RSSI) and different other sensors on Android. The code is still under development and partially buggy.