Indoor Custom Maps Application

Question

I am currently in the research phase of my project on Android. I am interested in developing indoor custom maps application. There are 2 problems I am currently facing in this:

1. I can't use GPS as it won't work in the indoor settings like a building or a mall
2. I can't use Google Maps API as I need to show my location on a indoor custom map(like a floor-plan of a building). I'm assuming here that I have the custom map of the building or mall.

Now my goal is to find location of the Android phone using some methods and display it on the custom map.To find the location I have following options,

1. Use of Bluetooth dongles or transmitters, I am assuming that Bluetooth dongles or transmitters are kept at known locations on the custom map and I know the coverage area for all of them. I will use methods like RSSI to get nearest dongle from my Phone.The problem here is I don't know how do I use this information to plot the location of my phone on the map.I have heard of shape files for Windows Mobile which are used for this purpose.Don't know how I can make use of them in Android.
2. Use of WiFi Access Points - Similar to Bluetooth.But cost is more than Bluetooth.

Can anyone please suggest some solutions to these problems.

Thanks.

Answer 1

What you are looking to do is create a GIS-type tool, not a map tool. Google Maps is for maps of known places and has data already built in for much of the world. I'm not aware of any GIS-support in Google maps for unknown places. While you can add layers to Google Maps (including your own GIS-type building map layer) I don't know that it will be of much help as you probably want to "zoom in" below the resolution that Google maps supports.

You can use Bluetooth or WiFi to locate the device, provided you have known end-points that you can identify the location of. In this case, I'd think you'd either need to estimate the location of the device (similar to how Google Maps draws a circle around the locator on the map when locating solely from wireless carrier towers). If you can detect the device at multiple doggles or transmitters I suspect you could triangulate to get a better fix.

Again, depending on your scale, you could use the built-in locator service with cell-tower location information, but I'm guessing that resolution is much to high for your application.

Answer 2

I got the workaround for plotting the dongle locations on the custom map using bluetooth.This is not the ideal answer but all I wanted was the approximate location of the device in a indoor setting.We can use the Android Bluetooth API to get RSSI readings from all the dongles and find the nearest dongle from the device.

Now to plot it on the custom map we can get an image of the map and overlay another marker image on the location coordinates(i.e using the pixel value of the dongle locations on the image).We can also add zooming functionality of the image to make it look like Google maps.We can also add ontouchlistener functions to add the functionality of clicking on the markers.

This is just the workaround I found.It wont give you the exact location of the device.If anyone wants the code please email to me.

Thanks,

Ameya