scholarly journals Sensors and Sensing Technologies for Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (20) ◽  
pp. 5924
Author(s):  
Francesco Potortì ◽  
Filippo Palumbo ◽  
Antonino Crivello

The last 10 years have seen enormous technical progress in the field of indoor positioning and indoor navigation; yet, in contrast with outdoor well-established GNSS solutions, no technology exists that is cheap and accurate enough for the general market. The potential applications of indoor localization are all-encompassing, from home to wide public areas, from IoT and personal devices to surveillance and crowd behavior applications, and from casual use to mission-critical systems. This special issue is focused on the recent developments within the sensors and sensing technologies for indoor positioning and indoor navigation networks domain. The papers included in this special issue provide useful insights to the implementation, modelling, and integration of novel technologies and applications, including location-based services, indoor maps and 3D building models, human motion monitoring, robotics and UAV, self-contained sensors, wearable and multi-sensor systems, privacy and security for indoor localization systems.

Geomatics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-176
Author(s):  
Maan Khedr ◽  
Naser El-Sheimy

Mobile location-based services (MLBS) are attracting attention for their potential public and personal use for a variety of applications such as location-based advertisement, smart shopping, smart cities, health applications, emergency response, and even gaming. Many of these applications rely on Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) due to the degraded GNSS services indoors. INS-based MLBS using smartphones is hindered by the quality of the MEMS sensors provided in smartphones which suffer from high noise and errors resulting in high drift in the navigation solution rapidly. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is an INS-based navigation technique that exploits human motion to reduce navigation solution errors, but the errors cannot be eliminated without aid from other techniques. The purpose of this study is to enhance and extend the short-term reliability of PDR systems for smartphones as a standalone system through an enhanced step detection algorithm, a periodic attitude correction technique, and a novel PCA-based motion direction estimation technique. Testing shows that the developed system (S-PDR) provides a reliable short-term navigation solution with a final positioning error that is up to 6 m after 3 min runtime. These results were compared to a PDR solution using an Xsens IMU which is known to be a high grade MEMS IMU and was found to be worse than S-PDR. The findings show that S-PDR can be used to aid GNSS in challenging environments and can be a viable option for short-term indoor navigation until aiding is provided by alternative means. Furthermore, the extended reliable solution of S-PDR can help reduce the operational complexity of aiding navigation systems such as RF-based indoor navigation and magnetic map matching as it reduces the frequency by which these aiding techniques are required and applied.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (20) ◽  
pp. 4550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasilis Stavrou ◽  
Cleopatra Bardaki ◽  
Dimitris Papakyriakopoulos ◽  
Katerina Pramatari

This paper has developed and deployed a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon-based indoor positioning system in a two-floor retail store. The ultimate purpose of this study was to compare the different indoor positioning techniques towards achieving efficient position determination of moving customers in the retail store. The innovation of this research lies in its context (the retail store) and the fact that this is not a laboratory, controlled experiment. Retail stores are challenging environments with multiple sources of noise (e.g., shoppers’ moving) that impede indoor localization. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work concerning indoor localization of consumers in a real retail store. This study proposes an ensemble filter with lower absolute mean and root mean squared errors than the random forest. Moreover, the localization error is approximately 2 m, while for the random forest, it is 2.5 m. In retail environments, even a 0.5 m deviation is significant because consumers may be positioned in front of different store shelves and, thus, different product categories. The more accurate the consumer localization, the more accurate and rich insights on the customers’ shopping behavior. Consequently, retailers can offer more effective customer location-based services (e.g., personalized offers) and, overall, better consumer localization can improve decision making in retailing.


Author(s):  
C. Basri ◽  
A. Elkhadimi

Abstract. The advancement of Internet of things (IoT) has revolutionized the field of telecommunication opening the door for interesting applications such as smart cities, resources management, logistics and transportation, wearables and connected healthcare. The emergence of IoT in multiple sectors has enabled the requirement for an accurate real time location information. Location-based services are actually, due to development of networks, sensors, wireless communications and machine learning algorithms, able to collect and transmit data in order to determine the target positions, and support the needs imposed by several applications and use cases. The performance of an indoor positioning system in IoT networks depends on the technical implementation, network architecture, the deployed technology, techniques and algorithms of positioning. This paper highlights the importance of indoor localization in internet of things applications, gives a comprehensive review of indoor positioning techniques and methods implemented in IoT networks, and provides a detailed analysis on recent advances in this field.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 427
Author(s):  
Jun Yan ◽  
Bingcheng Zhu ◽  
Liang Chen ◽  
Jin Wang ◽  
Jingbin Liu

Affected by the complexity of the indoor environment, accurate indoor positioning is challenging in many localization based services (LBS). Recently, it has been recognized that, visible light communication (VLC) is promising for indoor navigation and positioning, due to the low implementation cost with marginal modification to the existing infrastructure and the possibility to achieve high accurate positioning results. Provided that the positions of the light emitting diodes (LEDs) are known to the receiver, the angle of arrival (AOA) of the light signal is able to be estimated by a camera embedded in a smart phone, and thus the position of the smart phone can be derived based on the triangulation. In this paper, the performance of the positioning accuracy is analyzed based on indoor positioning with VLC, and the analytical upper bound of location error is derived. Extensive simulation results have verified the theoretical analysis on the VLC-based localization approach in different indoor scenarios. In order to obtain better location performance, the principles of choosing reference LED and localization LED are also given.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (16) ◽  
pp. 4410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal Jamil ◽  
Naeem Iqbal ◽  
Shabir Ahmad ◽  
Do-Hyeun Kim

Internet of Things is advancing, and the augmented role of smart navigation in automating processes is at its vanguard. Smart navigation and location tracking systems are finding increasing use in the area of the mission-critical indoor scenario, logistics, medicine, and security. A demanding emerging area is an Indoor Localization due to the increased fascination towards location-based services. Numerous inertial assessments unit-based indoor localization mechanisms have been suggested in this regard. However, these methods have many shortcomings pertaining to accuracy and consistency. In this study, we propose a novel position estimation system based on learning to the prediction model to address the above challenges. The designed system consists of two modules; learning to prediction module and position estimation using sensor fusion in an indoor environment. The prediction algorithm is attached to the learning module. Moreover, the learning module continuously controls, observes, and enhances the efficiency of the prediction algorithm by evaluating the output and taking into account the exogenous factors that may have an impact on its outcome. On top of that, we reckon a situation where the prediction algorithm can be applied to anticipate the accurate gyroscope and accelerometer reading from the noisy sensor readings. In the designed system, we consider a scenario where the learning module, based on Artificial Neural Network, and Kalman filter are used as a prediction algorithm to predict the actual accelerometer and gyroscope reading from the noisy sensor reading. Moreover, to acquire data, we use the next-generation inertial measurement unit, which contains a 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope data. Finally, for the performance and accuracy of the proposed system, we carried out numbers of experiments, and we observed that the proposed Kalman filter with learning module performed better than the traditional Kalman filter algorithm in terms of root mean square error metric.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 891
Author(s):  
Imran Ashraf ◽  
Soojung Hur ◽  
Yongwan Park

The last two decades have witnessed a rich variety of indoor positioning and localization research. Starting with Microsoft Research pioneering the fingerprint approach based RADAR, MIT’s Cricket, and then moving towards beacon-based localization are few among many others. In parallel, researchers looked into other appealing and promising technologies like radio frequency identification, ultra-wideband, infrared, and visible light-based systems. However, the proliferation of smartphones over the past few years revolutionized and reshaped indoor localization towards new horizons. The deployment of MEMS sensors in modern smartphones have initiated new opportunities and challenges for the industry and academia alike. Additionally, the demands and potential of location-based services compelled the researchers to look into more robust, accurate, smartphone deployable, and context-aware location sensing. This study presents a comprehensive review of the approaches that make use of data from one or more sensors to estimate the user’s indoor location. By analyzing the approaches leveraged on smartphone sensors, it discusses the associated challenges of such approaches and points out the areas that need considerable research to overcome their limitations.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7230
Author(s):  
Santosh Subedi ◽  
Jae-Young Pyun

In recent times, social and commercial interests in location-based services (LBS) are significantly increasing due to the rise in smart devices and technologies. The global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have long been employed for LBS to navigate and determine accurate and reliable location information in outdoor environments. However, the GNSS signals are too weak to penetrate buildings and unable to provide reliable indoor LBS. Hence, GNSS’s incompetence in the indoor environment invites extensive research and development of an indoor positioning system (IPS). Various technologies and techniques have been studied for IPS development. This paper provides an overview of the available smartphone-based indoor localization solutions that rely on radio frequency technologies. As fingerprinting localization is mostly accepted for IPS development owing to its good localization accuracy, we discuss fingerprinting localization in detail. In particular, our analysis is more focused on practical IPS that are realized using a smartphone and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a signal source. Furthermore, we elaborate on the challenges of practical IPS, the available solutions and comprehensive performance comparison, and present some future trends in IPS development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fan Yang ◽  
Jian Xiong ◽  
Jingbin Liu ◽  
Changqing Wang ◽  
Zheng Li ◽  
...  

Smartphone indoor localization has attracted considerable attention over the past decade because of the considerable business potential in terms of indoor navigation and location-based services. In particular, Wi-Fi RSS (received signal strength) fingerprinting for indoor localization has received significant attention in the industry, for its advantage of freely using off-the-shelf APs (access points). However, RSS measured by heterogeneous mobile devices is generally biased due to the variety of embedded hardware, leading to a systematical mismatch between online measures and the pre-established radio maps. Additionally, the fingerprinting method based on a single RSS measurement usually suffers from signal fluctuations due to environmental changes or human body blockage, leading to possible large localization errors. In this context, this study proposes a space-constrained pairwise signal strength differences (PSSD) strategy to improve Wi-Fi fingerprinting reliability, and mitigate the effect of hardware bias of different smartphone devices on positioning accuracy without requiring a calibration process. With the efforts of these two aspects, the proposed solution enhances the usability of Wi-Fi fingerprint positioning. The PSSD approach consists of two critical operations in constructing particular fingerprints. First, we construct the signal strength difference (SSD) radio map of the area of interest, which uses the RSS differences between APs to minimize the device-dependent effect. Then, the pairwise RSS fingerprints are constructed by leveraging the time-series RSS measurements and potential spatial topology of pedestrian locations of these measurement epochs, and consequently reducing possible large positioning errors. To verify the proposed PSSD method, we carry out extensive experiments with various Android smartphones in a campus building. In the case of heterogeneous devices, the experimental results demonstrate that PSSD fingerprinting achieves a mean error ∼20% less than conventional RSS fingerprinting. In addition, PSSD fingerprinting achieves a 90-percentile accuracy of no greater than 5.5 m across the tested heterogeneous smartphones


Author(s):  
Y. Yang ◽  
C. Toth ◽  
D. Brzezinska

Abstract. Indoor positioning technologies represent a fast developing field of research due to the rapidly increasing need for indoor location-based services (ILBS); in particular, for applications using personal smart devices. Recently, progress in indoor mapping, including 3D modeling and semantic labeling started to offer benefits to indoor positioning algorithms; mainly, in terms of accuracy. This work presents a method for efficient and robust indoor localization, allowing to support applications in large-scale environments. To achieve high performance, the proposed concept integrates two main indoor localization techniques: Wi-Fi fingerprinting and deep learning-based visual localization using 3D map. The robustness and efficiency of technique is demonstrated with real-world experiences.


Electronics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghulam Hussain ◽  
Muhammad Jabbar ◽  
Jun-Dong Cho ◽  
Sangmin Bae

The number of studies on the development of indoor positioning systems has increased recently due to the growing demands of the various location-based services. Inertial sensors available in commercial smartphones play an important role in indoor localization and navigation owing to their highly accurate localization performance. In this study, the inertial sensors of a smartphone, which generate distinct patterns for physical activities and action units (AUs), are employed to localize a target in an indoor environment. These AUs, (such as a left turn, right turn, normal step, short step, or long step), help to accurately estimate the indoor location of a target. By taking advantage of sophisticated deep learning algorithms, we propose a novel approach for indoor navigation based on long short-term memory (LSTM). The LSTM accurately recognizes physical activities and related AUs by automatically extracting the efficient features from the distinct patterns of the input data. Experiment results show that LSTM provides a significant improvement in the indoor positioning performance through the recognition task. The proposed system achieves a better localization performance than the trivial fingerprinting method, with an average error of 0.782 m in an indoor area of 128.6 m2. Additionally, the proposed system exhibited robust performance by excluding the abnormal activity from the pedestrian activities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document