Localization and tracking support is useful in many contexts and becomes crucial in emergency response scenarios: being aware of team location is one of the most important knowledge for incident commander. In this work both localization and tracking for rescuers are addressed in the framework of REFIRE project. The designed positioning system is based on the wellknown prediction-correction schema adopted in field robotics. Proprioceptive sensors, i.e., inertial sensors and magnetometer, mounted on the waist of the rescuers, are used to form a coarse estimation of the locations. Due to the drift of inertial sensors, the position estimate needs to be updated by exteroceptive sensors, i.e., RFID system composed by tags embedded in the emergency signs as exteroceptive sensors and a wearable tag-reader. In long-lasting mission RFID tags reset the drift by providing a positioning having room-level accuracy.

In the last decade, many efforts have been devoted to indoor localization and positioning. In this paper, a hybrid indoor localization system has been developed within the European project REFIRE for emergency situations. The REFIRE solution estimates the user's pose according to a predictioncorrection scheme. The user is equipped with a waist-mounted inertial measurement unit and a RFID reader. In the correction phase the estimation is updated by means of geo-referenced information fetched from passive RFID tags pre-deployed into the environment. Accurate position correction is obtained through a deep analysis of the RFID system radiation patterns. To this end, extensive experimental trials have been performed to assess the RFID system performance, both in static and dynamic operating conditions. Experimental validation in realistic environments shows the effectiveness of the proposed indoor localization system, even during long-last missions and/or using a limited number of tags.

In this paper, an algorithm to estimate the position of a pedestrian in a 3-dimensional space is introduced. The proposed algorithm exploits the data provided by a waist-worn inertial platform and does not rely on the presence of any external infrastructure. Relevant features are extracted from the accelerometer data and are used to detect pedestrian activities such as standing, walking, going upstairs, or going downstairs. The estimate of the position is updated through a step detection procedure, which combines the signals provided by the inertial platform with the information about the pedestrian activity class

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In this paper, we present an innovative cyber physical system for indoor and outdoor localization and navigation, based on the joint utilization of dead-reckoning and computer vision techniques on a smartphone-centric tracking system. The system is explicitly designed for visually impaired people, but it can be easily generalized to other users, and it is built under the assumption that special reference signals, such as colored tapes, painted lines, or tactile paving, are deployed in the environment for guiding visually impaired users along predefined paths. Differently from previous works on localization, which are focused only on the utilization of inertial sensors integrated into the smartphones, we exploit the smartphone camera as an additional sensor that, on one side, can help the visually impaired user to identify the paths and, on the other side, can provide direction estimates to the tracking system. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, by means of experimental tests performed in a real outdoor installation and in a controlled indoor environment.