NaviMe: The Indoor Tour Guide System

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NaviMe The Indoor Tour Guide System Amber Imam,
Wai Yong Low, Rashmi Sanbhadti, Sudeep
Yegnashankaran
Motivation
Architecture
Current navigation systems such as GPS are only
for outdoors. Buildings may be confusing to
navigate through, and tour guides can be
frustrating to deal with. Wouldnt it be nice if
you could have your own tour guide that gave
information about locations only you were
interested in? Objective To design an indoor
tour guide system that will pinpoint places of
interest within a building and help inform the
user about where he/she is. The application will
give an informative description about the current
location of the user based on surrounding
wireless routers. This information is useful for
many people at Carnegie Mellon, including
visitors or prospective students. However, the
NaviMe system can be extended to any collection
of buildings with a wireless network.

• User starts application on Nokia N95
• N95 detects nearby routers and signal strengths
• N95 accesses database to gather information about
  location
• User is notified of location and given a
  description

Results
The graph shows the routers detected and their
respective signal strengths for a specific
position. The greater the variance in signal
strength, the lower the reliability of the
router. We used the most reliable routers to
pinpoint the users location.
Development Environment

• Hardware
• Nokia N95
• Wireless Routers
• Initially Bluetooth (via Gumstix)

Why not use Bluetooth to help fine-tune
localization? Bluetooth signal was inconsistent
and varied greatly. For our purposes, the range
of the Bluetooth was too large, and the time to
detect surrounding Bluetooth beacons was too long
for a real-time system. Hence, we decided to use
just WiFi to detect our position.

• Software
• Symbian C
• Carbide
• Nuance TALKS

We collected signal strengths and router
locations to give users information about
locations in Newell Simon, Wean, and Porter Hall.
http//www.ece.cmu.edu/ece549/spring08/team2