Dec 2022 By Kevin Wen, Yajvan Ravan, Vasu Kaker, Michael Wong

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

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, and entry-exits between buildings.

High-Level Graph

More in-depth explanation can be found below.