Augmentation of Indoor Positioning Systems with a Barometric Pressure Sensor for Direct Altitude Determination in a Multi-storey Building

Abstract

A challenging task is to determine the correct floor of a user in a multi-storey building using pedestrian navigation and guidance services as most common indoor location techniques provide only 2-D position determination. Therefore it can be recommended to augment the position determination system with a barometric pressure sensor for direct observation of height differences. In the research project NAVIO (Pedestrian Navigation Systems in Combined Indoor/Outdoor Environments) tests with a barometric pressure sensor have been performed and their results are presented in the paper. The tests show that it is possible to determine the correct floor of a user using a barometric pressure sensor as the standard deviation of the estimation of the height differences is better than  0.5 m.