An indoor positioning system for a first responder in an emergency environment

An indoor positioning system for a first responder in an emergency environment is focused as one of the national agenda in Korea. In this area, many researches are carried out, still there left limitations of a system installation and an inconsistent positioning accuracy in the arbitrary emergency environment. This paper presents a new indoor positioning system for the first responder, especially firemen in the scene of a fire. The portability and adaptability for the emergency environment are mainly considered for a feasibility of the proposed system. With portable access points (APs), which can measure ranges to the other AP and the firemen based on IEEE 802.15.4a, in an indoor environment and a monitoring station in an outdoor environment, a control unit outside a building in fire can determine the position of the firemen and deployed APs using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods. In this paper, the concept and positioning procedure of the proposed system are introduced. An experiment on ranging is done to analyze an error characteristic of measurements, then the result is applied to a simulation for the positioning system to certify the possibility of the system operation in the emergency environment. The simulation result shows that the proposed indoor positioning system can be applied to help the firemen escape from the emergency environment safely.