CityWalker: A Mobile GPS for Walking Travelers

Global positioning system (CPS) is widely used in vehicle navigation however, they are unusable for pedestrians. Problems include inadequate information for optimized path-planning in the pedestrian level; and the human-computer interface (HCI) for vehicles basically does not work for walking user. This paper presents solutions to solve these problems through experiments. A new design of CPS based human navigation aid, called "City Walker", is proposed. CityWalker uses a digital fluxgate compass to rotate the map automatically, according to user's orientation. CityWalker thus provides a low-cost solution for building a CPS based, human oriented navigation tool on various mobile platforms.