Students from the Technion have developed a novel mobile indoor navigational system. A winning project of the 2012 Amdocs Best Project Contest in collaboration with Qualcomm experts, this indoor navigation system helps you find your way through any large building using a “Smartphone”.

 

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Technion students from the Faculty of Computer Science developed a new indoor navigation approach, which enables you to locate your position and find your way around a large building with the help of your “Smartphone.” It was the winning project of the 2012 Amdocs Best Project Contest.

Students Alex Portnov and Dror Baum, supervised by Itai Dabran, Chief Engineer of Technion’s Laboratory of Computer Communication and Networking, and Constantine Elster from Qualcomm, built an indoor map screening and route finding system on a Smartphone that lets the user locate a store in a huge mall, find an office in a large office building, or get to a specific gate at an airport.

“This is a mobile system that allows you to generating indoor navigation maps in seconds, allowing quick and efficient route finding using those maps,” explains Dror Baum. “Take a picture of already existing map or a blueprint of a building is all that takes to generate its navigation map. Hand draw a map, take a picture of it, give it a name; that’s it, you are done! As simple as that. ”

The mobile system automatically sketches an efficient route to follow, to reach your destination point. The application operates through multiple pathfinding stages:

-With the assistance of a Smartphone’s camera, the user photographs a printed or hand-written floor plan, area or maze.

-The phone sends the diagram to a server, which stores the picture together with additional parameters.

-The user indicates with his/her finger both the starting and destination points, and the phone sends a request to the server.

-The server initiates graphic algorithms and displays on the screen a drawing of the shortest distance between the two points that are obstacle free.

-The picture becomes stored in the server, and is given a QR Code so that it may be reused multiple times.

The algorithms are calculated rapidly, and the map and route are drawn in under a minute. “In effect, we built a framework for indoor map making and navigation, based on a building’s architectural plan,” explain the students. “If a shopping mall’s floor plan will be featured in the form of a barcode at the entrance, shoppers will be able to scan it on their Smartphone and within seconds, get the shortest route to their desired store location.”

During the process, distractions such as colors are automatically eliminated from the scanned diagram, so that a clear navigational map can be achieved, upon which routes can be found and drawn.