Geomagnetic positioning as an addition to GPS

GPS is a great technology that just a few decades ago seemed fantastic. Now even those people who do not understand the principles of operation of this technology at all, use geotagging with might and main, working with services like Foresquare or with the same maps from Google (or Apple with Yandex doesn’t matter). But GPS has one small problem — inside the building, the GPS module may not work, and in most cases it happens. And you need to navigate inside large buildings, and not only for tourists. Here the magnetic field of our planet can come to the rescue.

The fact is that the geomagnetic field of the planet is non-uniform, there are so-called geomagnetic anomalies that can serve as a criterion for geomagnetic positioning. And inside the buildings it all works just fine. Neither metal nor wiring will interfere with the orientation using geomagnetic positioning.
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The smartphone can quite cope with the task of fixing geomagnetic points, but you need specialized software. The accuracy of geomagnetic positioning is about 2 meters. This technology will help to navigate in high-rise buildings, underground and in other places where GPS does not work.

It is clear that in order to start working with such technology, it will be necessary to first fix those geomagnetic anomalies, which are referred to above. This is similar to how a map is revealed in some games (recall the same Dune on Sega or any other game where you need to study every corner of each location to open a map). Such geomagnetic maps using the same smartphone can “merge” into a single system, which, if new software is used by a large number of users, will help you navigate the most inaccessible places in terms of GPS.

The implementation of this technology is carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Oulu in Finland. The in-building positioning system developed by this team is called IndoorAtlas. How the system works is shown in detail in the video below.



Via dvice