Indoor Magnetic Fields

The IMF project is supported by the Laboratoire d'analyse et de mathématiques appliquées (LAMA) and the Geoloc laboratory.

Being able to locate pedestrians in an indoor environment, such as in a building, is a key issue in many fields: locating first responders (civil security, firefighters, etc.), securing industrial sites, helping visually impaired people navigate, etc. In particular, the constraints of indoor environments make the use of GPS complicated, if not impossible.

Indoors, the use of GPS positioning is complicated or impossible. Other positioning methods rely on radio beacons or inertial and magnetic sensors whose measurements are processed to estimate the user’s coordinates at each instant knowing the initial coordinates. A difficulty with this approach is that the initial orientation of the pedestrian to the North is unknown, and cannot be derived from the inertial sensors data.

To access this missing information, we can use a magnetometer as a compass. But indoors, numerous objects (electronic equipment, steel beams in walls, power lines, etc.) interfere with these measurements.

The aim of the IMF project is to describe these magnetic disturbances using statistics tools to be able to cross-reference magnetic measurements at different locations, and therefore disturbed by different sources, to deduce magnetic North.

Contacts: Thomas Bonis (LAMA) - thomas.bonis@univ-eiffel.fr ; Valérie Renaudin (Geoloc) - valerie.renaudin@univ-eiffel.fr