BatMapper-Plus: Smartphone-Based Multi-level Indoor Floor Plan Construction via Acoustic Ranging and Inertial Sensing

Abstract

The lack of floor plans is one of the major obstacles to ubiquitous location-based services indoors. Dedicated mobile robots with high-precision sensors can scan and produce indoor maps, but the deployment remains low. Existing smartphone-based approaches usually adopt computer vision techniques to build the 3D point cloud, at the cost of extensive image collection efforts and the risk of privacy issues. In this paper, we propose BatMapper-Plus which constructs accurate and complete indoor floor plans by acoustic ranging and inertial sensing on smartphones. It employs acoustic signals to measure the distance to a nearby wall segment, and produces the accessible area by surrounding the building during walking. It also refines the constructed floor plan to eliminate scattered segments, and identifies connection areas including stairs and elevators among different floors. Extensive experiments in a teaching building and a residential building have shown our effectiveness compared with the state-of-the-art, without any privacy concerns and environmental limitations.