Using Multiple Barometers to Detect the Floor Location of Smart Phones with Built-in Barometric Sensors for Indoor Positioning

Sensors

Hao Xia²  Xiaogang Wang³  Yanyou Qiao²  Jun Jian²  Yuanfei Chang²  Sisi Zlatanova¹ 

[1] The Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, No.20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China;;The Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, No.20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China; E-Mails:;Sichuan Geological Survey, No.25 Renmin Road, Chengdu 610081, China; E-Mail:

关键词: floor positioning;    barometer;    smart phones;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s150407857

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Following the popularity of smart phones and the development of mobile Internet, the demands for accurate indoor positioning have grown rapidly in recent years. Previous indoor positioning methods focused on plane locations on a floor and did not provide accurate floor positioning. In this paper, we propose a method that uses multiple barometers as references for the floor positioning of smart phones with built-in barometric sensors. Some related studies used barometric formula to investigate the altitude of mobile devices and compared the altitude with the height of the floors in a building to obtain the floor number. These studies assume that the accurate height of each floor is known, which is not always the case. They also did not consider the difference in the barometric-pressure pattern at different floors, which may lead to errors in the altitude computation. Our method does not require knowledge of the accurate heights of buildings and stories. It is robust and less sensitive to factors such as temperature and humidity and considers the difference in the barometric-pressure change trends at different floors. We performed a series of experiments to validate the effectiveness of this method. The results are encouraging.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.