Welcome to the Mobile Indoor & Hyperlocal Navigation (MINav) Research Group at the University of Edinburgh

Location information is a fundamental component of many innovative and intelligent context-aware applications. The de-facto standard for location discovery has been the Global Positioning System (GPS) that can locate users anywhere on earth. Recently, GPS receivers are finding their way into mobile phones, providing location information that enables deployment of many innovative location-aware applications and services. A major disadvantage of GPS is it generally does not work indoors and in heavily build-up areas. Ironically, this is where most people spend their time and where location-aware applications would be of most value. Getting GPS location fix can take up to several minutes which is too slow for mobile applications, while good amount of processing power is consumed by GPS receiver that can quickly drain battery life of mobile phones

MINav aims to address these challenges. Our research focuses on exploiting several wireless technologies in order to improve positioning and navigation in urban areas and indoors. Majority of our current work deals with developing algorithms, techniques and software solutions based on wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to provide ubiquitous location information targeted for mobile phone platforms. Learn more about our work by selecting the Research and/or Publication menu