Collaborative Navigation for Defence and Emergency Services: Augmenting Team Navigation And Situational Awareness

Indoor navigation remains an unsolved, or at best, partially solved problem. Some of the most promising technologies for providing indoor location and navigation capability rely on the use of deployed infrastructure, which allows for users of customized equipment and/or applications to operate within the specific venue where the technology is deployed, but not beyond its walls. While infrastructure can provide a solution to indoor navigation, its use imposes functional constraints on user systems attempting to exploit it, including the unfeasible presumption that the emergency services can support every deployed technology and brand in the case of dedicated systems, or that the WiFi access points or other signals of opportunity at least be present and powered in the case of their use. For the emergency services or defense personnel, it is not possible to predict where such infrastructure will be needed or available in advance, or to ensure that the building in question will have power at the time of entry. To avoid these pitfalls it is desirable to have indoor navigation solutions that are not explicitly dependent on the use of installed infrastructure to maintain acceptable positioning and navigation capability.

This article describes the design, development and evaluation of a system based on the concept of collaborative navigation whereby teams of users operating together within the same area can collectively navigate. The developed system exploits the fact that both emergency services and defense personnel are expected to enter buildings in teams to enhance the navigation capabilities of each user within the group, while also providing situational awareness information about each team member to every cooperating user.