From a person’s point of view, walking through a door is unremarkable. From a positioning system’s point of view, it is one of the most important moments in the journey: information that worked a few steps ago stops being reliable, and different information becomes available.
Outside: satellites are the reference
Under open sky, GNSS provides a global position reference, and outdoor positioning can lean on it heavily.
At the threshold: the signals change
As a person approaches and passes through an entrance, several things change at once. Satellite signals weaken or disappear. Wi-Fi access points inside the building become visible. The person keeps moving, and the motion sensors keep measuring that movement.
Transition detection is the job of recognizing this change. By looking at how the available signals behave together, a positioning system can recognize when outdoor assumptions are no longer enough and change how much it trusts each source.
Inside: keep estimating
Indoors, the system keeps estimating motion and position with the information it has: Wi-Fi, inertial sensing, pressure, map information and other available signals. Inertial sensing bridges the moments when radio information is sparse; the indoor map keeps the estimate to places a person can actually walk.
Going up or down
Buildings add a vertical dimension that outdoor positioning rarely has to consider. Pressure sensing can help estimate vertical movement, providing floor context when a person takes the stairs or an elevator.
Why the boundary matters
Many safety-critical moments happen just after the boundary: a responder entering a structure, a worker moving from a yard into a plant, a patient leaving a ward. A system that treats outdoor and indoor positioning as separate products loses continuity exactly there. KPT’s approach is to treat positioning as a continuum rather than separate indoor and outdoor systems.
Read how this applies to Emergency Response and Workforce Safety.