Development of indoor positioning system by using the infrared rays data communication tags for pedestrian navigation

In the present study, we focused on the development of an indoor positioning system that is easy to use, portable and universally accessible. This system is capable of providing correct positional information anywhere indoors. Although GPS exhibits superior performance outdoors, there has been a considerable amount of research into indoor position determination by means of high-sensitivity GPS, pseudolites (GPS pseudo satellite), RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags, and wireless LAN. However, the positioning rate, precision, radio signal interference, and cost performance levels of such technologies are still not high enough for general use, which is why they have not yet spread to pedestrian navigation systems. As a potential remedy, we created and examined an indoor positioning system using standard cellular phones with built-in GPS and infrared rays data communication functionalities, which are in widespread use in Japan. By this research, although indoor positioning of target precision 10 m required for pedestrian navigation has been realized in the comparatively narrow range, you still have to improve in respect of the rate of positioning.