An indoor service area determination approach for pedestrian navigation path planning

ABSTRACT Indoor navigation has been studied for many years, but it still has many limitations. In current navigation, pedestrians need to tell navigation systems the destination, because it is one of the preconditions for path planning. However, in some indoor cases, pedestrians cannot specify a destination because they have no information about where it is or even cannot be sure if there is a desired one. We believe that determining a service area is a possible way to handle such cases. For example, a service area that can be reached within a 2-min walk. In this paper, we propose an indoor service area determination approach for pedestrian navigation path planning. We demonstrate this approach in a shopping mall with multi-floors. The results show that it can successfully compute the reachable spaces and thereby helping people to select and arrive at the most appropriate destination. This approach is also useful for other indoor navigation applications within public buildings like offices, airports, theaters, hospitals, and museums where pedestrians would like to make a choice between multiple facilities of the same type, such as printers, registration desks, ATMs, AED, garbage bins, even exits.