Indoor navigation with free WLAN
In actual fact, this announcement would not have been worth mentioning. After all, it’s available elsewhere as well. Since November 2011, the telecommunications service provider Siemens Enterprise Communications GmbH & Co. KG in Adlershof has been providing WLAN access free of charge for the forum around the con.vent Center and the bistro Esswirtschaft. During their midday break, for example, employees and students in Adlershof can then check their email, view the status of their friends on social networks, or run apps for the next tram or city railway.
Rainhard Zübner-Baake of the Siemens Wista Team is convinced: with a bandwidth of only two megabytes (synchronised), there will surely be nobody willing to migrate his daily schedule to the space between the forum and the wind tunnel. But in these times of notebooks and smartphones, services of this kind make the forum more appealing and constitute a “contribution to modern urbanity”. Simply find the hotspot, accept the terms of use, and surf away. Yet this is only the beginning at the science location Adlershof. The Adlershof company Cruso GmbH for information and navigation systems has made a name for itself by developing the first mobile GPS city guide for pedestrians. Now work is progressing on the development of indoor localisation. Robert Wolff at Cruso explained that this cannot be realised with GPS systems, but WLAN must be used instead. When the positions of the access points distributed around the building are known, also the position of the receiver can be calculated. According to Wolff, this will run in future on the Cruso and as an app on smartphones. It therefore comes as no surprise that Cruso has docked on the free WLAN project run by Siemens Enterprise. “It is an excellent test environment that we can use as an example for presenting our solution,” confessed Wolff. Potential uses are in large buildings with a complex infrastructure. “For instance, these can be trade fair halls or grounds where you can find your way about faster and more easily.” Rainhard Zübner-Baake of the Siemens Wista Team is pleased to see a small idea grow into a greater one. But that’s how it is in Adlershof.
by Klaus Oberzig