Indoor Positioning Using the OpenHPS Framework

Journal of Location Based Services, 2011

The development of Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) has become an important add-on to many existing location aware systems. While GPS has solved most of the outdoor RTLS problems, it fails to repeat this success indoors. A number of technologies have been used to address the indoor tracking problem. The ability to accurately track the location of people indoors has many applications ranging from medical, military and logistical to entertainment. However, current systems cannot provide continuous real time tracking of a moving target or lose capability when coverage is poor. The deployment of a real time location determination system however is fraught with problems. To date there has been little research into comparing commercial systems on the market with regards to informing IT departments as to their performance in various aspects which are important to tracking devices and people in relatively confined areas. This paper attempts to provide such a useful comparison by providing a review of the practicalities of installing certain location sensing systems. We also comment on the accuracies achieved and problems encountered using the position-sensing systems.

2015

Spatial awareness is identified as a key feature of today’s mobile devices. While outdoor navigation has been accessible and broadly used for some time already with the help of GPS, indoor positioning has not yet made it into mainstream life. GPS and other GNSS systems offer accuracy of a scale different to that required for efficient indoor navigation. This research aims to investigate how a number of sensors such as a Digital Compass, Bluetooth and Accelerometer may be combined to calculate device position and orientation to perform directional querying in a spatial database. These three technologies were chosen because they appear in some mobile devices available today and are likely to become even more widespread in the nearest future.

The past decade has witnessed substantial research on methods for indoor Wi-Fi positioning. While much effort has gone into achieving high positioning accuracy and easing fingerprint collection, it is our contention that the general problem is not sufficiently well understood, thus preventing deployments and their usage by applications to become more widespread. Based on our own and published experiences on indoor Wi-Fi positioning deployments, we hypothesize the following: Current indoor Wi-Fi positioning systems and their utilization in applications are hampered by the lack of understanding of the requirements present in the real-world deployments. In this paper, we report findings from qualitatively studying organisational requirements for indoor Wi-Fi positioning. The studied cases and deployments cover both company and public-sector settings and the deployment and evaluation of several types of indoor Wi-Fi positioning systems over durations of up to several years. The findings suggest among others a need for supporting all case-specific user groups, providing software platform independence, low maintenance, allowing positioning of all user devices, regardless of platform and form factor. Furthermore, the findings also vary significantly across organisations, for instance in terms of need for coverage, which motivates the design of orthogonal solutions.

Journal of Sensors, 2017

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) use sensors and communication technologies to locate objects in indoor environments. IPS are attracting scientific and enterprise interest because there is a big market opportunity for applying these technologies. There are many previous surveys on indoor positioning systems; however, most of them lack a solid classification scheme that would structurally map a wide field such as IPS, or omit several key technologies or have a limited perspective; finally, surveys rapidly become obsolete in an area as dynamic as IPS. The goal of this paper is to provide a technological perspective of indoor positioning systems, comprising a wide range of technologies and approaches. Further, we classify the existing approaches in a structure in order to guide the review and discussion of the different approaches. Finally, we present a comparison of indoor positioning approaches and present the evolution and trends that we foresee.

Frontiers in Public Health

Apart from being extremely dependent on GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, GALLILEO, etc.) technologies for outdoor positioning, an indoor positioning technology can vary mainly due to dynamic environment. Indoor positioning systems in past year are becoming more and more popular because it’s easier to deploy than ever, due to the growing use of the smartphones. This small devices are equipped with sensors which can sense move, inclination, speed, signal strength … Despite of that, the domination of single indoor technology has not yet being achieved, thus the paper will present each technology, principles and approaches, it will be pointed out some system combinations and it will present some available products as examples. Finally, some pros and cons during research are noted as well as prediction in terms of domination of certain systems.

2019

This work proposes PINSPOT; an open-access platform for collecting and sharing of context, algorithms and results in the cutting-edge area of indoor positioning. It is envisioned that this framework will become reference point for knowledge exchange which will bring the research community even closer and potentially enhance collaboration towards more effective and efficient creation of indoor positioning-related knowledge and innovation. Specifically, this platform facilitates the collection of sensor data useful for indoor positioning experimentation, the development of novel, self-learning, indoor positioning algorithms, as well as the enhancement and testing of existing ones and the dissemination and sharing of the proposed algorithms along with their configuration, the data used, and with their results.

2000

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Cricket, a location-support system for in-building, mobile, locationdependent applications. It allows applications running on mobile and static nodes to learn their physical location by using listeners that hear and analyze information from beacons spread throughout the building. Cricket is the result of several design goals, including user privacy, decentralized administration, network heterogeneity, and low cost. Rather than explicitly tracking user location, Cricket helps devices learn where they are and lets them decide whom to advertise this information to; it does not rely on any centralized management or control and there is no explicit coordination between beacons; it provides information to devices regardless of their type of network connectivity; and each Cricket device is made from off-the-shelf components and costs less than U.S. $10. We describe the randomized algorithm used by beacons to transmit information, the use of concurrent radio and ultrasonic signals to infer distance, the listener inference algorithms to overcome multipath and interference, and practical beacon configuration and positioning techniques that improve accuracy. Our experience with Cricket shows that several location-dependent applications such as in-building active maps and device control can be developed with little effort or manual configuration.