AI indoor navigation service

The service is designed to enable any customer guide visitors through destinations and interact with spaces, benefiting leaders across transportation, retail, recreation, and many other domains.

By providing visual and audio directions for accessibility, the solution is facilitating autonomous navigation. What’s more, the system is driving user experience by enabling great personalization to provide the visitors with information about the entered venue.

The service is user-friendly and easy-to-setup:

• The user is assisted by the company’s technician to scan the location and capture required data
• After scanning, the data is stitched to create a map
• The user can manage the map to control the permissions to updating the location and decide on how future visitors can interact with it
• After finalization, the visitors can navigate the location using both visual and audio guides

The service is made up of:

 
1. A custom web application for the client’s internal tech personnel for adding new buildings and points of interest to the navigation system
2. A custom mobile application for the end user to take interior pictures and send those images to the inference service, so that the system can navigate the user to the selected destination
3. And the inference service that extracts specific features from images to match those features with the scanned model of the added building or point of interest – the spot with the best match is used as the predicted location

During the project’s scope, we faced multiple challenges associated with:

The improvement of the SLAM system

The size and similarity of spaces within some larger buildings has burdened image processing and comparison. To overcome the challenge, our engineers autotuned thresholds for each pipeline microservice and minimized potential false positive responses.

The hosting of the SLAM system 

Such solutions require significant computational resources for adequate response times at an acceptable cost. To solve this challenge, our engineers went with message brokers and divided the components into individual pipeline microservices that accommodate the required computational resources to meet those needs.

The scaling of the delivered solution 

In order to support the scanning of different facility types all across the globe, including airports, train stations, schools, museums, and others, we delivered a custom Infrastructure-as-a-code system, which enables a quick, one-click setup of buildings and clusters.

The monitoring of performance, user behavior, and scaling

To ensure high uptime and facilitate user experience, we established individual monitoring within clusters.

The client was aimed at replacing an existing inference service to accelerate user satisfaction and loyalty, concurrently optimize response times and costs, as well as streamline localization precision. 

By leveraging the upgrade, the company can harness:

• New customers, higher demand, and expanded revenue streams

The client can attract more customers and leverage future opportunities for growth and profit.

• Business agility

The client can introduce new features and updates more frequently, invest strategically, and adapt to changes without compromising business performance and reliability.