IndoorPositioning – Page 3

iBeacon Deployment Parameters for Locating

Researchers from the The Hong Kong Polytechnic University have a new paper on Performance Evaluation of iBeacon Deployment for Location-Based Services in Physical Learning Spaces (pdf) that tests environmental and deployment factors, indoors and outdoors, related to using ibeacons for locating. It provides recommendations for iBeacon deployment in terms of location, density, transmission interval, fingerprint space interval and collection time.

The paper provides a great introduction to positioning using beacon received signal strength (RSSI). It describes trilateration and fingerprinting methods for determining location.

Key insights are:

High temperature, strong wind and blocking by pedestrians degraded the signal strength.
Pedestrians traffic blocking the line of sight caused the most signal attenuation and variation.
High air temperature caused significant increase of packet loss that affected the RSSI.
Strong wind reduced the signal strength but didn’t affect the stability of signals.
Trees and nearby vehicle traffic didn’t have any negative effects on signals.
Lower error rates were observed when beacons were deployed on the ceiling as opposed to on the wall.
Positioning accuracy improved with ceiling placement due to the reduction of obstructions.
If ceilings are too high or ceiling deployment is impracticable wall mounted iBeacons should be placed as high as possible.
For fingerprinting, sample at 2m grid intervals for 6s to 10s at each point. Avoid having too many beacons as this won’t improve the positioning accuracy. A transmission interval of 100ms is detrimental to the positioning accuracy. 417ms is better.
For fingerprinting, positioning accuracy varies greatly according to the what is in the room.

The paper mentions that beacon UUID, major and minor are used to uniquely identify beacons. While this is true in the context of detecting using apps, most locating systems use gateways. Gateways use the Bluetooth MAC address to uniquely identify beacons and the advertising type, iBeacon, Eddystone or other, is irrelevant. Using gateways as receivers is also a solution to the problem of variability in receiving capability across smartphones.

The study only considered one beacon type and two receiving smartphones. At Beaconzone, we recommend experimenting with the actual hardware in the actual environment as, being wireless radio, optimum settings and can vary considerably.

Read about location accuracy

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

System for Searching Factory Stock

A common problem in factories is manual searching for stock for input to manufacturing. Stock is usually stored in boxes or pallets and can be in one of many rooms, warehouses or might already be somewhere on the factory floor. A large amount of stock arrives and leaves every day leading to logistical challenges keeping up with the whereabouts of goods. Timely delivery of components or sub-assemblies is critical to ensure smooth flowing of production and making best use of factory resources.

Manual paper-based processes are extremely inefficient and prone to human error. Old fashioned RFID or barcodes are also susceptible to error because data is only as up to date as the last scan and a recent scan might not have occurred.

Bluetooth is an ideal technology for solving this problem because it provides real-time location. We previously wrote about the advantages of using beacons in industry and how Bluetooth is suitable for use on the electrically noisy factory floor.

We offer multiple solutions for tracking stock and can adapt them to your exact needs, for example integrating with your existing systems. Once you have a tracking system in place you can use it for extra purposes such as locating jobs/work orders, monitoring machine/people capacity and providing for location based instruction/tasks. Sensing open/closed, on/off and quantities such as temperature and vibration enables diagnostics, monitoring and prognostics.

Read about Asset and Pallet Tracking for Manufacturers

FIND Framework for Internal Navigation and Discovery

FIND is an open source indoor locating system for home automation, indoor local positioning and passive tracking. It uses your smartphone or laptop to pinpoint your position in your home or office with a location precision of below 10 sq ft.

FIND uses scanning of WiFi and Bluetooth:

FIND compiles these different signals can be compiled into a fingerprint which can be used to uniquely classify the current location of that device

Read the documentation, the FAQ and source code on GitHub.

The Affect of Power Levels on Wireless Indoor Localisation Accuracy

There’s new research by Umair Mujtaba Qureshi, Zuneera Umair and Gerhard Petrus Hancke of the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong on Evaluating the Implications of Varying Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Transmission Power Levels on Wireless Indoor Localization Accuracy and Precision. The paper takes a deep look into the relationship between transmitted power and signal stability. It also looks at ways of filtering received signal strength (RSSI) data to improve the location accuracy.

The main insight is that along with the expected difference in the RSSI attenuation there is a considerable difference in the BLE signal variation at all transmission power levels with respect to distance. The variation increases and the localisation accuracy decreases from high to low transmission power levels:

Another observation is that outliers in the data tend to affect the localisation accuracy. Applying filters to the data, they achieved a location accuracy of 2.2 meters with a precision of 95%.

One comment we have is that the researchers didn’t try different beacons. As we mentioned in 2016, the RSSI stability also varies across different beacon models.

Need more help? Consider a Feasibility Study.

Using iBeacons for Motorola TRBONet

Motorola MOTOTRBO range two-way Radios can be used with the Motorola-supplied TRBOnet PLUS (pdf) control room software to show the location of workers with digital radios on maps and plans. The radios contain both GPS and iBeacon detection to allow locating indoors.

There are three places where iBeacons need to be set up in TRBOnet:

In the GPS profile:

Placing beacon on the map:

Are you an established 2-way radio company?
Contact us for advice on which beacons we have supplied for use with TRBONet.

Read the full User Guide
View compatible beacons

Cow Positioning with iBeacon Technology

There’s a video at YouTube on the installation of Raspberry Pi based beacon detectors in a cow shed to detect the position of cows.

Beacon detectors

Beacon on a cow

Beacons can, in fact, do a lot more than just determine location. For example, it’s possible to track extra things such as temperature, humidity and unexpected movement. In the cow shed case, hall effect beacon sensors can be put on gates to alert when gates are open/closed when they shouldn’t be. The location data can be used to provide geofencing to alert when things, people or animals enter or leave specific areas.

Beacon Location Accuracy

There’s some recent new research on ‘Analysis of Object Location Accuracy for iBeacon Technology based on the RSSI Path Loss Model and Fingerprint Map’ by Damian Grzechca, Piotr Pelczar, Łukasz Chruszczyk.

They evaluated RSSI and indoor positioning trilateration algorithms in order to determine location accuracy. After lots of experimentation and mathematics, they calculated the average error to be 1.09m for 1–9m and 1.75m for 1-20m and after trilateration an average error 2.45m was achieved.

The conclusions give some hints how better results might be achieved. For example, correlating the RSSI with accelerometer, gyroscope and other sensors. Other strategies might be to excluding areas where an object
cannot move, or filtering out situations where objects move but accelerometer measurements don’t match.