BeaverNav

Dec 2022

Problem

MIT is a large campus with thousands of rooms/hallways/buildings/staircases/elevators. Finding one’s way around campus can be difficult and daunting.

Our Solution

Indoor navigation for MIT’s campus: Enables users to navigate between rooms, provides routes from start destination to end destination

Note this is still a work in progress & is not yet a live website

Navigation inside a building
Navigation between buildings

We built this using the following pipeline:

  1. Scrape Floor Plans from MIT website, and process into images
  2. Extract key information (room coordinate locations & names) via pre-trained neural network text detection and recognition models (EAST, Easy OCR).
  3. Remove all doors & text from the floorplans & downsample (reduce resolution)
  4. Create a graph treating every pixel as a node in the graph
  5. Condense graph offline by running an additional all pairs shortest paths algorithm (APSP) & use A* for online planning
  6. Create an “abstracted graph” of MIT’s campus using elevators, staircases, entry-exits between buildings
High-Level Graph

More in-depth explanation can be found below

Code

Demo:

Project Presentation: