A Hybrid Indoor Location Positioning System

Indoor location positioning techniques have experienced impressive growth in recent years. A wide range of indoor positioning algorithms has been developed for various applications. In this work a practical indoor location positioning technique is presented which utilizes off-the-shelf smartphones and low-cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) nodes without any further infrastructure. The method includes coarse and fine modes of location positioning. In the coarse mode, the received signal strength (RSS) of the BLE nodes is used for location estimation while in the fine acoustic signals are utilized for accurate positioning. The system can achieve centimeter-level positioning accuracy in its fine mode. To enhance the system’s performance in noisy environments, two digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms of (a) band-pass filtering with audio pattern recognition and (b) linear frequency modulated chirp signal with matched filter are implemented. To increase the system’s robustness in dense multipath environments, a method using data clustering with sliding window is employed. The received signal strength of BLE nodes is used as an auxiliary positioning method to identify the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation paths in the acoustic positioning mode. Experimental measurement results in an indoor area of 10 m2 indicate that the positioning error falls below 6 cm

Realization Limits of Impulse-Radio UWB Indoor Localization Systems

In this work, the realization limits of an impulse-based Ultra-Wideband (UWB) localization system for indoor applications have been thoroughly investigated and verified by measurements. The analysis spans from the position calculation algorithms, through hardware realization and modeling, up to the localization experiments conducted in realistic scenarios. The main focus was put on identification and characterization of limiting factors as well as developing methods to overcome them