iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
We sometimes get asked for location beacons or which beacons are best for determining location. All beacons can be used for locating. While there are physical aspects such as battery size/life and waterproofing that make some beacons more suitable for some scenarios, locating capability is determined more by the software used rather than the beacons … Continue reading “Location Beacons”
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 … Continue reading “Using iBeacons for Locating Robots”
There’s a research paper by Thomas Tegou, Ilias Kalamaras, Markos Tsipouras, Nikolaos Giannakeas, Kostantinos Votis and Dimitrios Tzovaras of Information Technologies Institute, Greece on A Low-Cost Indoor Activity Monitoring System for Detecting Frailty in Older Adults. The paper describes a room-level accuracy indoor localization system, based on Bluetooth RSSI, to assess the frailty in older … Continue reading “Using iBeacon to Assess Elderly Frailty”
Connected factory implementations require a large number of connected assets for condition-based monitoring, asset tracking, inventory (stock) management or for building automation. Bluetooth is a secure, low cost, low power and reliable solution suitable for use in connected factories. In this post, we examine the reasoning behind some out-of-date thinking on industrial wireless, uncover the … Continue reading “Bluetooth LE on the Factory Floor”
A mentioned in our post on location accuracy, two methods of improving accuracy are calibration and trilateration. There’s a recent research paper on iBeacon indoor localization using trusted-ranges model, that explores an alternative ‘trusted-ranges’ method. The method is still based on the RSSI measurements between the beacon and detector. It builds up a trusted-range model … Continue reading “Trust Range Method of Improving Location Accuracy”
There’s a new Bluetooth LE Wiki maintained by our founder, Simon Judge: The Wiki includes information about Bluetooth LE idioms such as advertising, MAC address, Bluetooth name, GATT, transmit power, measured power, range, RSSI, mesh and the new direction finding feature. It also has links to hardware and programming information.
A new direction finding feature has been released for Bluetooth 5.1 (pdf). Using more than one antenna, as used by Quuppa, allows for direction finding. The paper on Enhancing Bluetooth Location Services with Direction Finding explains how location services currently use RSSI to estimate the distance. Direction finding introduces more advanced Angle of arrival (AoA) and … Continue reading “New Bluetooth Direction Finding Feature”
A problem with navigation in vehicles is that location can be lost in radio-shadows such as in tunnels and in tree covered areas. ChoonSung Nam and Dong-Ryeol Shin of Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea have a new paper on Vehicle location measurement method for radio-shadow area through iBeacon. Beacons are placed at the side of the … Continue reading “Enhanced Vehicle GPS Using Beacons”
In our previous article iBeacon Microlocation Accuracy, we wrote about ways of using beacon RSSI to determine location. However, what if you were to use and combine beacon RSSI with other ways of locating to create a hybrid method? This is the topic of a new research Unsupervised Indoor Localization Based on Smartphone Sensors, iBeacon and … Continue reading “Hybrid Localisation Method”
Customers often ask us the accuracy when locating beacons. In order to get the answer, its necessary to understand different ways of locating and the tradeoffs that are needed to get the different levels of accuracy. There are two types of locating, received signal strength (RSSI) based and angle of arrival direction finding (AoA). Locating … Continue reading “iBeacon Microlocation Accuracy”