Indoor navigation

Abstract: In our day to day activity, imagine if you go to a museum, hospital or any kind of huge building. You need to find the best way to get into a specific depart- ment. It might be difficult to find the way even if you have the map of the building in your hand. Indoor positioning systems can be used to locate people or objects inside a building, using radio waves, signals, or other sensory information collected by a smartphone or tablet. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons broadcast signals, and bluetooth devices, such as smartphones, can then receive these signals. BLE devices can take Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) information together with an algorithm to calculate the location of the user. This is a useful method for indoor environments when using Global Positioning System (GPS) is not an option [1]. In this project I tried to find a better solution for localization and navigation when GPS does not work. The focus of the project is to use communication be- tween smartphones and beacons, for guidance in inside environments, without using GPS. This thesis is about the applications I produced, which can be used for indoor localization and navigation. Using the applications, you can map any building such as university, hospital, museum, big mall etc. To map a building, you upload a map of the building and put waypoints where you placed beacons. Once mapping is done, you can log in to the web admin and put some informa- tion for each beacon. As a user, when outside a nearby mapped building, your phone can get notified (trough bluetooth), and you can download the user app, which includes the map of the building and shows your location. With the user app you can easily find your favorite places in the building and get information about place near you.