Indoor positioning system based on Bluetooth beacons

• Grinyak V.M.

  Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service
  Vladivostok. Russia

• Grinyak T.M.

  JSC TeraRecon inc.
  Tokyo. Japan

• Tsibanov P.A.

  Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service
  Vladivostok. Russia

The paper is devoted to research of possibility to use Bluetooth devices for indoors navigation. Relying on alternative measurements such as Wi-Fi network, onboard accelerometers, Bluetooth devices are vastly used to solve positioning and navigation problems when there are limitations to use global positioning satellite systems (such as GPS). Recently the indoors navigation became a stand-alone subclass of the research problems with subset of developed math models and the implementation hardware. Even though there is a lot of interest in the solution of the problem, there are still no standard approach. Due to the accuracy limitations of the broadly available mobile devices applying inertial navigation approach would dramatically reduce variety of the hardware it could be used. Relying on available Wi-Fi networks for evaluation of navigation parameters also has accuracy limitations. However, using Bluetooth signal considered as way prospective for solving navigation problems. Due to the small size, relatively low prices of Bluetooth transmitters and signal features (indoors walls and bulkheads are not transparent) it is possible to deploy special indoors infrastructure for navigation purposes.

At this paper, there is a common model definition for the object movement at the superposition field of set of “visible” Bluetooth transmitter signals. For solutions, authors relay on linear approximation with applying Kalman’s algorithm and least squares method. The research includes numerical experiment results for defined set of physical parameters of the system such as an error of evaluation of signal level, signal-sampling frequency typical for modern smartphones. There are results of 2D navigation modeling for 2 types of indoor geometry (big square room and long narrow corridor) with different configurations of navigation system (location of Bluetooth transmitters on the walls). The research covers 2 main problems: static and kinematic.

Identified significant dependency from navigation network configuration on the accuracy of location and velocity evaluation. Numerical experiment shows that the evaluation error of kinematic problem is about twice bigger than it is for static problem. The paper also present results of real experiments for static and kinematic problems with using SKYLAB Bacon VG01 Bluetooth transmitters and smartphone Samsung Galaxy S8. Real experiments confirmed that math model with linear approximation defined by authors is usable for solving indoors navigation problems using Bluetooth signal. The paper concludes that nature of the measurement available for Bluetooth signals is applicable for indoors accurate enough navigation for typical distances “object-beacon” in the range not more than 5–7 meters.

Keywords: information system, indoor navigation, beacons, Bluetooth, position, velocity, least squares method.