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Indoor Mapping Literature Review: Researching the Capabilities of Current Indoor Mapping Technologies and Practices
Citation:
Jones, K., A. Lutes, D. Womack, T. Boe, AND S. Lee. Indoor Mapping Literature Review: Researching the Capabilities of Current Indoor Mapping Technologies and Practices. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-22/084, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
Indoor mapping has rapidly become a powerful tool for creating and generating a variety of use cases, from quickly rendering realistic models to accurately recording measurements and maps. This study investigated the capabilities of current indoor mapping technologies and their relevance to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) mission.
Description:
Global positioning systems (GPS) provide users with positioning, navigation, and timing services. However, this resource is limited when it comes to gathering information and guidance for interior spaces: GPS signals communicate with satellites and do not move easily through solid objects, such as brick, stone, metal, or wood, which prevents users from mapping interior spaces. This limitation of GPS gave rise to the study and science of indoor mapping, a process for creating, generating, and viewing location and navigational data within buildings or other environments that cannot be accessed by GPS. Indoor mapping has developed rapidly within the last decade. Thanks to ever-evolving technologies, users are now able to use indoor mapping by relying heavily on the placements of sensors, lasers, and/or photos to generate realistic measurements that can imitate the advanced geolocation data generated by GPS applications. These processes allow the successful re-creation of most types of interiors and provide accurate location and navigational data within buildings with relative ease. The purpose of this study was to describe the capabilities of current indoor mapping technologies and their relevance for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) efforts.