Nowadays, the evolution of localisation and navigation technologies is vast, aiding towards facilitating users’ guidance in various environments. Outdoor positioning can be easily achieved, with the widely used Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which comprise a universal standard for positioning and are included in every person’s mobile device. However, due to the presence of high buildings in dense urban environments and bad reception in indoor environments, the performance of GNSS is significantly degraded. Therefore, alternative ways of positioning and localisation respectively, need to be explored. In indoor environments, unlike outdoors, there is no universal standard, as the different indoor localisation techniques, that are currently implemented have their own bottlenecks. The most widely used Wi-Fi fingerprinting, requires a constantly up-to-date radio map of the signals from the Wi-Fi access points, whose creation is also a heavy and time-consuming technique. Additionally, other techniques require an installation of costly sensors or either equipment.

Therefore, this thesis investigates the possibility of the ceilings in public or semi-public buildings, being used for indoor localisation, by using features that are included in a simple mobile device. The research additionally involves location tracking of different users, in order to discover different movement patterns in an indoor facility. Indoor localisation is achieved based on the comparison of user and reference data, that can be both point clouds and images, using the Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) of an iPad 12 pro and camera sensors of an Android device. The point cloud-based localisation is implemented based on different combinations of global and local registration techniques, while the image-based approach involves different feature detection, description and matching techniques. Using a web-application to visualise the indoor localisation results, an indoor model and a network graph of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, location tracking of different users is implemented and visualised in a heat-map. Additionally, a dashboard is created that can be used by a facility manager to translate the user paths to valuable information and reveal different movement patterns in an indoor facility.

The followed methodology showed promising results, concerning the reliability of ceilings for real-time indoor localisation, based on LiDAR and camera sensors, that are incorporated in up-to-date mobile devices. The robustness of Colored Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm for indoor localisation based on point clouds was revealed, both in terms of time efficiency and quality, while the combination of Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) feature detector and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor provides the optimal indoor localisation results with image data. The proposed pipeline revealed encouraging results for use in emergency situations, based on static data acquisition of a user, while it is also suitable for dynamic applications, in case a sensor is mounted on an automated device for indoor mapping operations.

Indoor localisation methods are an essential part for the management of COVID-19 restrictions, social distancing, and the flow of people in the indoor environment. Moving towards an open work space in this scenario requires effective real-time localisation services and tools, along with a comprehensive understanding of the 3D indoor space. This project’s main objective is to analyse how ArcGIS Indoors can be used with location awareness methods to elaborate and develop space management tools for COVID­-19 restrictions in order to reopen the workspace for TU Delft Campus. This was accomplished by using six Arduino micro controllers, which were programmed in C++ to scan all available Wi-­Fi fingerprints in the east wing of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft and send over the data to an ArcGIS Indoor Information Model (AIIM). The data stored on the AIIM is then accessed using the app on the user’s Android device using REST Application Programming Interface (API) where a kNN based matching algorithm then identifies the location of the user. The results show that the localisation is not consistent for rooms that are directly above each other or share common access points. However, when functioning to locate different tables inside a room, the system proved to uniquely distinguish between the specific tables. As a result, we can conclude that based on the size of the rooms, more Arduino devices should be installed to achieve an ideal accuracy. Finally, recommendations are made for the continuation of this research.