CrowdNavi: Last-mile Outdoor Navigation for Pedestrians Using Mobile Crowdsensing

Navigation services using digital maps make people's travel much easier. However, these services often fail to provide specific routes to those destinations that lack micro data in digital maps, such as a small laundry store in a shopping area. In this paper, we propose CrowdNavi, a last mile navigation service in outdoor environments using crowdsourcing based on the guider-follower model. First, we collect trajectories of guiders and images of reference objects along trajectories. To guide followers by reference objects along the route, we design a Semantic Crowd Navigation model to generate fine-grained maps by integrating guiders' data. Second, we design two score functions to fulfill two main requirements and plan hints. Last, we provide context-aware navigation for followers based on the fine-grained map and detect deviation in real-time. Real world experiments conducted in three different areas show that our proposed system in combination with images of reference objects is efficient.