In Situm, we distinguish between Indoor and Outdoor Positioning:

  • Indoor Positioning refers to the geolocations generated when the user is within a calibrated building (which may or may not be an indoor space: e.g. it may be an outdoor plaza within a corporate complex). 
  • Outdoor Positions are all the rest: geolocations anywhere in the world except in calibrated area.


Similarly, we can define Indoor Routes and Outdoor Routes:

  1. Indoor Routes are those whose start and end an Indoor Positions.
  2. Outdoor Routes are those whose start and end an Outdoor Positions.
  3. Indoor-Outdoor Routes are those whose start is an Indoor Position and whose end is an Outdoor Position.  
  4. Outdoor-Indoor Routes are those whose start is an Outdoor Position and whose end is an Indoor Position.  


Situm provides Indoor Routes, and can be combined with outdoor navigation providers (e.g. Google Maps) to provide the rest (Outdoor, Indoor-Outdoor, Outdoor-Indoor).  



Indoor Routes

In the following figure, we have a building whose floorplan is delimited by the dotted perimeter. We have calibrated the green area, and left the red area uncalibrated. In this environment, Situm is able to compute Indoor Routes if the user is in the green area and the destination is also in the green area (e.g. from the start "S" to the end "E"). We show an example of a route as a blue arrow.



Outdoor Routes

In case the start "S" and end "E" lie outside the calibrated (green) area, the Indoor Route can not be computed. Therefore, an outdoor navigator provider must be used to compute the Outdoor Route (black arrow).



Indoor-to-Outdoor navigation

If we want to compute a route from an Indoor to an Outdoor location, we can split the problem in half:

  1. Compute an Indoor Route (blue arrow) with Situm, from the start "S" point to the frontier of the building (e.g. a special Point of Interest).  
  2. Compute and Outdoor Route (black arrow) with and outdoor navigation provider, from the frontier of the building to the end "E" point.



Outdoor-to-Indoor navigation

This case is the same as the "Indoor-to-Outdoor" navigation case, but the other way around.