Indoor positioning system survey using BLE beacons

This project provides a survey of indoor positioning systems and reports experimental work with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons. A positioning algorithm based on the Received Signal Strength Index (RSSI) from Bluetooth Low Energy signals is proposed for indoor tracking of the position of a drone. Experimental tests for characterization of beacon signals are presented. The application of a Kalman filter to reduce the effect of fluctuations in beacons signals is described

Development of Indoor Positioning System Using RSSI and Beacon Weight Approach in iBeacon Networks

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Increasing the location accuracy of the Indoor Positioning System (IPS) is an important research area in localization. Utilizing mobile beacons in IPS environment has made localization more accurate and cost-effective. This research developed a Filtered RSSI and Beacon Weight Approach (FRBW) based on improved Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) using Kalman filter. This approach takes both the distance and improved RSSI measurements between beacon nodes into consideration. Kalman filter is applied on the RSSI measurements that eliminate noise of the signal and then applied on FRBW positioning algorithm. The developed approach was applied and validated in IPS experiments using Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. The results show that this FRBW approach has better positioning accuracy and minimum location error, and can be applied in IoT applications in smart city

AN INDOOR BLUETOOTH-CENTRIC PROXIMITY BASED POSITIONING SYSTEM

In recent years, positioning and navigation become an important topic in research. The most popular positioning system is an outdoor positioning called Global Positioning System (GPS). However, due to the influence of weak signal strength, weather conditions, diverse geographical and living environments, GPS sometimes cannot support indoor positioning and, if it can, the 5-10 meters error range does not meet the indoor positioning requirement. In order to provide a better solution with higher accuracy for indoor localization, we can benefit from the proliferation of indoor communication devices. Different technologies such as WiFi, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Ultra-wideband (UWB) have been commonly used in indoor positioning systems. However, WiFi has a high energy consumption for indoor localization, as it consumes 3 to 10 watts per hour in the case of using 3 routers to do the job. In addition, due to its dependency on reference tags, the overall cost of the RFID-based approaches may usually cost more than $300 which is economically prohibitive. In terms of UWB, its low area coverage brings great challenges to popularizing its acceptance as a device for indoor positioning. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based iBeacon solution primarily focuses on the proximity based detection, and its low power consumption and low price bring great potential for its popularity. In this report, assuming that the resident owns a smartphone which is powered on, we present an iBeacon based indoor positioning system and provide some strategies and algorithms to overcome the indoor noise of possibly weak indoor Bluetooth signals. In our system, the Received Signal Strength Index (RSSI) is pre-processed to eliminate noise. Then, the distance between a mobile device and a BLE signal source can be calculated by combination use of pre-processed RSSI, Kalman Filter, and machine learning. In the end, the current mobile device position can be determined by using a triangulation algorithm. Our experimental results, acquired through running experiments in a real-world scenario, show that the localization error can be as low as 0.985m in the 2D environment. We also compared our results against other works with the same research objectives

Filtering Effect on RSSI-Based Indoor Localization Methods

Indoor positioning systems are used to locate and track objects in an indoor environment. Distance estimation is done using received signal strength indicator (RSSI) of radio frequency signals. However, RSSI is prone to noise and interference which can greatly affect the accuracy performance of the system. In this paper Internet of Things (IoT) technologies like low energy Bluetooth (BLE), WiFi, LoRaWAN and ZigBee are used to obtain indoor positioning. Adopting the existing trilateration and positioning algorithms, the Kalman, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Particle filtering methods are employed to denoise the received RSSI signals to improve positioning accuracy. Experimental results show that choice of filtering method is of significance in improving the positioning accuracy. While FFT and Particle methods had no significant effect on the positioning accuracy, Kalman filter has proved to be the method of choice in for BLE, WiFi, LoRaWAN and ZigBee. Compared with unfiltered RSSI, results showed that accuracy was improved by 2% in BLE, 3% in WiFi, 22% in LoRaWAN and 17% in ZigBee technology for Kalman filtering method

BLE Beacons for Indoor Positioning at an Interactive IoT-Based Smart Museum

The Internet of Things (IoT) can enable smart infrastructures to provide advanced services to the users. New technological advancement can improve our everyday life, even simple tasks as a visit to the museum. In this paper, an indoor localization system is presented, to enhance the user experience in a museum. In particular, the proposed system relies on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons proximity and localization capabilities to automatically provide the users with cultural contents related to the observed artworks. At the same time, an RSS-based technique is used to estimate the location of the visitor in the museum. An Android application is developed to estimate the distance from the exhibits and collect useful analytics regarding each visit and provide a recommendation to the users. Moreover, the application implements a simple Kalman filter in the smartphone, without the need of the Cloud, to improve localization precision and accuracy. Experimental results on distance estimation, location, and detection accuracy show that BLE beacon is a promising solution for an interactive smart museum. The proposed system has been designed to be easily extensible to the IoT technologies and its effectiveness has been evaluated through experimentation

Optimized Indoor Positioning for static mode smart devices using BLE

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology and BLE-based devices such as iBeacons have become popular recently. In this work, an optimized indoor positioning approach using BLE for detecting a smart device’s location in an indoor environment is proposed. The first stage of the proposed approach is a calibration stage for initialization. The Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is collected and pre-processed for a stable outcome, in the second stage. Then the distance is estimated by using the processed RSSI and calibrated factors in the third stage. The final stage is the position estimation using the outputs from the previous steps. The positioning technique, which is an improved Least Square estimation is evaluated against the other well-known techniques such as, Trilateration-Centroid, classic Least Square Estimation in estimating the user’s location in the 2D plane. Experimental results show that our proposed approach has promising results by achieving an accuracy of positioning within 0.2 to 0.35m