Wi-Fi-based positioning in underground mine tunnels

The Owl Positioning System (OwlPS) was originally designed as a general-purpose Wi-Fi-based indoor positioning system. It is also a tool to compare several positioning techniques from the same input data, and was used for this purpose in previous work. In this work, OwlPS is adapted to a very specific “indoor” environment, namely underground mine tunnels, which brings its own problematics in terms of radio signal propagation and therefore impacts positioning system design. Experiment were conducted at a formerly exploited gold mine, at 70 metres under ground level, across about 400 metres of drifts. Several scenarios were defined to mimic typical use cases.