Locating Smartphone Indoors by Using Tightly Coupling Bluetooth Ranging and Accelerometer Measurements

High-precision, low-cost, and wide coverage indoor positioning technology is the key to indoor and outdoor integrated location-based services, and it has broad market prospects and social value. However, achieving sub-meter level positioning accuracy in indoor environments remains a real challenge d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRemote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 14; no. 14; p. 3468
Main Authors Yan, Ke, Chen, Ruizhi, Guo, Guangyi, Chen, Liang
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.07.2022
Subjects
accelerometer
Accelerometers
Accuracy
Bluetooth
Global navigation satellite system
Indoor environments
indoor positioning
Kalman filters
Location based services
multi-module BLE
Radios
Random variables
Receivers & amplifiers
Remote sensing
Sensors
smartphone
Smartphones
speed constraint
Transmitters
UKF
User behavior
Wireless communications
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Summary:High-precision, low-cost, and wide coverage indoor positioning technology is the key to indoor and outdoor integrated location-based services, and it has broad market prospects and social value. However, achieving sub-meter level positioning accuracy in indoor environments remains a real challenge due to the blockage of indoor Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals, the complexity of indoor environments, and the unpredictability of user behavior. In this paper, we introduce a multi-module BLE broadcaster (MMBB)-based indoor positioning solution in which a tightly coupled fusion architecture is implemented on a smartphone. The solution integrates ranging measurements from multiple MMBB and the measurements of the accelerometer built into a smartphone. It becomes an instant positioning solution without any training phase by adopting a calibrated linearly segmented path loss model for ranging. We apply the pedestrian walking speed derived by the smartphone accelerometer to constrain an unscented Kalman filter method that is used to estimate the location and speed. The accuracy of the proposed method is 50% at 0.79 m and 95% at 1.6 m at in terms of horizontal error distance. Position update frequency is 10 Hz and the time to first fix is 0.1 s. The system can easily adapt a global coordinator system so that it can seamlessly work together with the GNSS to form an indoor/outdoor positioning solution.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs14143468