3D indoor positioning system based on Bluetooth beacons

This paper devoted to research of indoors navigation problems under poor or insufficient quality of satellite navigational data environment. The problem of object positioning in 3D space by Bluetooth devices located indoors forming a multi-position tracking system is considered in this research. Emphasized that in order to succeed for such system it is required to pre-estimate distinctive accuracy. The proposed model interpretation of the positioning problem as the system of linear equations. The classic model interpretation for method of least squares is used for resolution. General problem of linearization around reference resolution is the locality of its features. There are three concepts of problems solvability, such as fundamental solvability (observability), solvability in conditions of instrumental measurement errors and solvability under conditions of finite accuracy of computation on a computer. The first aspect of solvability is interpreted by the completeness of the rank of the corresponding system of linear algebraic equations, the second and third ones represents by the conditionality of the problem and the convergence of the iterative estimation procedure. The conducted experiments show that for the positioning problem the attributes of the linearized model are accurate enough to represent the original nonlinear problem. Such interpretation allows to build theoretical accuracy estimation priors for object coordinates evaluations and to identify the areas with insufficient positioning accuracy. In this paper there are results of expected accuracy evaluation for various system patterns with full-scale experiments proving the theoretical calculations. Experiments for problems with using SKYLAB Beacon VG01 Bluetooth transmitters and smartphone HUAWEI WAS-LX1 are presented and confirmed that math model with linear approximation defined by authors is usable for solving indoors navigation problems using Bluetooth signal. So, for good enough quantity and appropriate location of the tracks the achievable positioning accuracy could be as good as 0.2-0.3 meters for all three coordinates. Such accuracy allows to navigate small hovering objects such as drones. In general, it looks promising to use Bluetooth trackers for solving positioning problems for indoors environments.

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