SLAM Dance: GNSS/Intertial-Aided Location and Mapping Indoors

Abstract

Imagine walking into a strange place — a shopping mall or an office building — wandering around for 20 minutes or so, and then coming out with a map of the facility that others could use to navigate through it — say, a fire rescue crew or simply someone looking for an office suite. A team of researchers at the German Aerospace Center are working on a “walk-about” solution that uses GPS to initialize the beginning of the traverse and tie the position data to an absolute coordinate frame. Then, foot-mounted inertial sensors increase the map accuracy when a person revisits previous points in the building.