Author: Support

Using iBeacons for Locating Robots

Beacons are great for use with robots for use in determining extra contextual information. There’s recent research on Autonomous Navigation of an Indoor Mecanum-Wheeled Omnidirectional Robot Using Segnet (pdf) that uses iBeacons to determine a rough location of the robot.

The locating uses Kalman filtering and trilateration to get a fix for the robot.

If you want to learn more about using RSSI to determine robot location there’s also a presentation video Robot Localization using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons RSSI Measures by David Obregón Castellanos.

Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)

Using AI Machine Learning on Bluetooth RSSI to Obtain Location

In our previous post on iBeacon Microlocation Accuracy we explained how distance can be inferred from the received signal strength indicator (RSSI). We also explained how techniques such as trilateration, calibration and angle of arrival (AoA) can be used to improve location accuracy.

There’s new research presented at The 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys ’19) by researchers from Nagoya University, Japan that looks into the use of AI machine learning to process Bluetooth RSSI to obtain location.

Their study was based on a large-scale exhibition where they placed scanning devices:

They implemented a LSTM neural network and experimented with the number of layers:

They obtained best results with the simplest machine learning model with only 1 LSTM:

As is often the case with machine learning, more complex models over-learn on the training data such that they don’t work with new, subsequent data. Simple models are more generic and work not just with the training data but with new scenarios.

The researchers managed to achieve an accuracy of 2.44m at 75 percentile – whatever that means – we guess in 75% of the cases. 2.44m is ok and compares well to accuracies of about 1.5m within a shorter range confined space and 5m at the longer distances achieved using conventional methods. As with all machine learning, further parameter tuning usually improves the accuracy further but can take along time and effort. It’s our experience that using other types of RNN in conjunction with LSTM can also improve accuracy.

If you want to view the research paper you need to download all the papers from the conference (zip) and extract p558-uranoA.pdf. Some of the other papers also make interesting, if not directly relevant, reading.

Read about AI Machine Learning with Beacons

Bluetooth Multi-hop Networks

There’s an in-depth paper by Nicole Todtenberg and Rolf Kraemer on A Survey on Bluetooth Multi-hop Networks. The paper describes the basics of Bluetooth and Bluetooth Mesh.

The paper goes on to describe connected networks (scatternets) and connectionless networks including some complex topics such as scatternet formation, topology maintenance, optimisation, inter-piconet scheduling and packet forwarding.

Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh

Bluetooth Low Energy now in Amazon FreeRTOS

Amazon has recently announced support for Bluetooth Low Energy in Amazon FreeRTOS. Amazon FreeRTOS is an IoT operating system for microcontrollers. Support for Bluetooth LE allows you to see Bluetooth devices and extract sensor data. Amazon’s implementation also allows you to subscribe to MQTT topics over Bluetooth Low Energy through an iOS or Android mobile device.

There’s an example how to Perform OTA Updates on Espressif ESP32 using Amazon FreeRTOS Bluetooth Low Energy. It shows how to connect Amazon FreeRTOS devices using Bluetooth Low Energy to AWS IoT Core via Android and iOS devices.

Fleet and Asset Tracking with iBeacons and Geotab

Bluetooth iBeacons are increasingly being used with fleet tracking. An example is Geotab who claim to be:

“World’s leading connected vehicle company, helping businesses leverage data to better manage and track their fleet”.

GeoTab has IoX extensions that extend the capabilities of their system.

IOX-BT

One such extension is IOX-BT which monitors beacons attached to tools and equipment. This allows the system to be used to improve asset utilisation, reduce misplaced equipment, boost productivity, reduce operational costs and improve on-time delivery.

Building Construction Industry Time and Attendance Tracking

One of our clients Chime Software Limited, part of Wren Construction, is offering a Time and Attendance Tracking system for the building construction industry. It’s a mobile and desktop solution allowing teams to easily collaborate.

The clock in and clock out uses iBeacons. It’s possible to view and authorise timesheets either from your desktop or mobile phone. It’s also possible to take textual and photographic notes for sharing across a team or project.

What is a Smart Factory?

A new article at IoT World Today asks Is My Smart Factory Smarter Than Yours? It’s Hard to Say.

The latter part of the article explains how, when there’s a problem in a smart factory, it can have large affects. The onus is on technology that can predict problems before they cause downtime. This leads to questions where the data processing should be the observations that:

“In the long-run, pushing everything to the cloud doesn’t work from a cost point of view.”

and

“Once you aggregate and compress the data, for example, to ‘max,’ ‘min,’ ‘outliers,’ ‘average’ and stuff like that, you lose the ability to run data science”

Such situations are the focus of our new Sensor Cognition™ technology that can provide machine intelligence at the edge.

Insights into Bluetooth Mesh

There’s an informative article at LEDs Magazine on Bluetooth Mesh expert addresses questions about connected SSL. The expert is Simon Slupik, CTO of Silvair and chair of the Mesh Working Group at the Bluetooth SIG.

While the article explains the use of Bluetooth mesh in the context of lighting, many of the concepts are equally as applicable in other applications of mesh. The article covers robustness, interference immunity, low energy, scalability, antennas and security.

Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh