SmartCampusAAU

SmartCampusAAU is a framework for enabling indoor positioning and navigation in any building. The SmartCampusAAU framework was created as part of the SmartCampusAAU research project which was carried out at Aalborg University, Denmark. The project's web page can be found at http://smartcampus.cs.aau.dk/ and contains instructions on how to use the framework.

SmartCampusAAU takes a collaborative approach: It is the end users who enable indoor positioning and navigation in a building. This is done by building a so-called radio map using the SmartCampusAAU app (for Android, iPhone or Windows Phone).

Once a radio map has been built, developers can make use of indoor positioning and navigation by importing the SmartCampusAAU library into their app.

The SmartCampusAAU app has been developed at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University in collaboration with MapsPeople who have created tiles that display building floors on top of Google Maps in places where Google itself does not provide this service.

Instructions on how to use the SmartCampusAAU app to build radio maps can be found in the downloads section on the SmartCampusAAU web page. Similarly, the page contains instructions on how to use the SmartCampusAAU library to leverage the indoor positioning and navigation capabilities in one's own app.

SmartCampusAAU is based on the location fingerprinting technique which relies on collecting signal strength measurements in a building. SmartCampusAAU supports two kinds of positioning based on the location fingerprinting technique: Device-Based Positioning where Wi-Fi scanning and positioning is done one a user's own SmartPhone, and Infrastructure-Based Positioning where Wi-Fi scanning and positioning is done on the Infrastructure side. Note that whereas Device-Based Positioning can be done in any building where an ordinary Wi-Fi infrastructure is in place, Infrastructure-Based Positioning requires an extra dedicated positioning infrastructure that is usually not in place.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The code from the SmartCampusAAU project is made available as-is. The repository is no longer being maintained, and we are also not available to offer advice on how to use or tweak the code in addition to what can be found in this repository and on the SmartCampusAAU webpage.

Structure

The following is an overall description of the components that consitute the SmartCampusAAU framework.

Backend

This folder contains the backend. The backend stores the radio maps (Device-Based and/or Infrastructure-Based radio maps).

RadioMapService3

This is the backend that contains the Device-Based radio maps. It has been implemented as a WCF Data Service and the original SmartCampusAAU radio maps are exposed as OData at the following URL:
http://smartcampusaau.cs.aau.dk/RadioMapService3/RadioMapService.svc/ . Append '$metadata' to this URL to view the metadata.

This is the backend that is used in the Android library and app. A radio map is downloaded to the mobile device on-demand when arriving at a building, and then on-device positioning ensues.

WifiSnifferPositioningService

This is the backend for Infrastructure-Based radio maps. You may use this code to establish an Infrastructure-Based Positioning Service, but you need to deploy it on your own server. SmartCampusAAU is not hosting such a service as Infrastructure-Based positioning carry a very large communication overhead.

This is the backend that is used by the iOS and Windows phone apps and libraries as these two platforms do not allow Wi-Fi scanning which is necessary to do device-based positioning.
However, iOS devices now support on-device positioning via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, aka. iBeacons. In order to achieve this you can port the functionality from the Android library.

Android

Library

The positioning functionality is exposed via the com.smartcampus.android.location.LocationService class (see the SmartCampusAAU web page for details on how to use the positioning library). The class delegates the location determination responsibility to a WifiPosEngine class which in turn uses a class that implements the IPositioningAlgorithm interface to arrive at the position estimates. In order to substitute the default algorithm for your own, you can inject an IPositioningAlgorithm implementation into the WifiPosEngine class.

SmartCampusApp

This is the app that is used to build a (device-based) radio map.

The user interface has been implemented as a web view in collaboration with MapsPeople. MapsPeople have created tiles that allow building floors to be displayed on top of Google Maps for several buildings used in the SmartCampusAAU project. The communication between the app's native code and the javascript UI takes place in the two files 'com.smartcampus.javascript.DeviceInterface' (where JS files call into the native API) and 'com.smartcampus.javascript.JSInterface' (where the app calls functions in JS files).

SmartCampusClient

This is a template for a client that uses the SmartCampusAAU positioning library. This project can also be downloaded from the SmartCampusAAU web page, and instructions can also be found there.

iOS

SmartCampusApp

This is a port of the Android app for building radio maps, except this app is used to build infrastructure-based radio maps.

Libraries

Infrastructure-Based positioning can be done through a RESTful interface as described on the SmartCampusAAU webpage. These libraries are used primarily to ease the task of parsing the JSON responses from an Infrastructure-Based positioning service.

WinPhone

This is a port of the Android app for building a radio map.

Client-side objects are automatically generated by Visual Studio when adding a service reference to an Infrastructure-Based positioning service. Therefore, no libraries are made available to parse the JSON responses.