A smartphone-based indoor localisation system using FM and Wi-Fi signals

Abstract

Indoor localisation has the potential to revolutionise the way people navigate indoors, similar to the tremendous impact that GPS has had on outdoor navigation. A number of solutions have been proposed for indoor localisation but most rely on specialised hardware or on the presence of a strong (access point) infrastructure. Many places do not have such infrastructure, thus limiting the use of these indoor localisation technologies. We propose a smartphone-based solution using FM and Wi-Fi signals that uses commercial off-the-shelf hardware which can be connected as and when required and thus addresses some of the potential privacy concerns. We show through our experiments that the proposed system can be used even in areas with low FM and Wi-Fi signal coverage. Our system achieves a mean localisation error of 2.84 m with a 90th percentile error of 4.03 m. In addition, we show the robustness of our system in a realistic and challenging environment by using a 4 month old training database.