Wi-Fi attitude and position tracking

An approach for pedestrian navigation in indoor environments is presented. It addresses mobile platforms with low processing power and low-cost sensors. Outdoors the horizontal attitude of a device can be easily detected using electronic compasses. Indoors magnetic disturbances lead to unreliable compass outputs. In this paper a novel approach for attitude and position tracking is introduced. Four horizontally arranged directional antennas are used to collect the Wi-Fi signal strengths of transmitters (access points) in range. For attitude estimation an extended Kalman filter is used, and for position tracking Wi-Fi fingerprinting. With this approach the attitude of a mobile device can be estimated and the position can be tracked in indoor environments like e.g. museums. This enables the use of electronic guides that offer additional information by means of augmented reality on exhibits in visual range. Possible accuracies are evaluated in simulations. A test with measurements collected in a museum demonstrates the functionality of the approach.