A "door-to-door" Path-finding Approach for Indoor Navigation

Indoor navigation is gaining an increasing interest among researchers in many domains. In many cases users need to orient quickly in complex environments, which is not always the target of current routing algorithms. The paper reviews current indoor pathfinding approaches and discusses some of the limitations. In order to support a natural movement in buildings, typically for emergencies, we purpose a new indoor path-finding approach, that is, the “door-to-door” approach. We present an algorithm, which is applied to 2D floor plan of buildings with complex indoor structure. The algorithm consists of two-level routing: one is to get coarse route between rooms, and the other one is applied to single rooms to acquire the detailed route. Ultimately, several instances are given to illustrate advantages and feasibility of the door-to-door approach. From the test results it is evident this algorithm runs well even on quite complex floor plans. The paper concludes with a discussion of future work, which is to extend the routing approach into 3D, i.e. considering the vertical direction, indoor obstacles and path-finding in 3D scenarios. * Corresponding author.