Orienteering research
The sport of orienteering is a great source of inspiration for research in artificial intelligence and more.
The challenges of navigating through complex terrains with limited information and the need for real-time decision-making align closely with many AI problems, especially for geo-spatial intelligence. I develop orienteering research through various channels: research projects, student projects, and bachelor's and master's theses.
Contact me if you are interested in working on these topics.
Examples of orienteering research topics
What is the best route choice?
The aim of this project is to develop an automated method to compute the optimal route choice in
orienteering competitions.
How do orienteers localize themselves?
This question lies at the intersection of spatial cognition, sports science, and
applied
AI.
In this work, we present a novel interactive web application and accompanying dataset designed to
systematically study map-based localization in orienteering.
How to extract better contours from DEMs?
Master's thesis by Øyvind Hjermstad (2025) on improving contour line extraction from
Digital Elevation Models.
Can we achieve accurate localization without GPS?
Research project funded by Chalmers AoA Transport starting in 2026, titled AI
methods
for vision-based terrestrial localization. The goal is to develop robust, interpretable, and
infrastructure-light AI methods for localization using visual input, inertial data, and public maps such as
OpenStreetMap and orienteering maps.