CODEWITHSUNDEEP
localizationibeaconindoor-positioning-system
Himanshu Verma
Himanshu Verma

Reputation: 11

Using an emitter iBeacon to perform indoor localization

After searching over the internet, I found that most iBeacon (BLE) systems use a smartphone as a receiver to estimate the proximity with a beacon.

However, my question is what if we reverse the infrastructure. Meaning that, a person wears a bluetooth beacon (that emits/advertises), and within a room there are several bluetooth receivers (not necessarily smartphones) that receive the packets from the emitter beacon, and then an algorithm estimates the position of the beacon inside the room. These Bluetooth receivers can all be installed on the walls of a room (one per wall) and communicate the received signal strength (RSSI) to a server that estimates the position of the emitting beacon.

Has anyone tried this approach? Or an existing system that does it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 278

Answers (1)

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 64961

While it is not as common of a use case as using mobile smartphones to detect fixed beacons, it is also possible to have mobile beacons with fixed beacon scanners.

The typical approach is to place small scanner computers at points of interest and report their beacon signal measurements to a server, which can then estimate the position of the mobile beacon depending on which scanner is closest.

While I have worked on a couple of custom systems that use this technique, they are much, much more complicated and fragile than the more common approach of fixed beacons with mobile smartphones. I am also unaware of any off-the-shelf or open source systems that do this.

Upvotes: 1

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