iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
There’s a new solution to track cleaning staff that provides app and web source code to implement a cleaning staff tracking system using iBeacons:
Manage beacons, buildings, zones and broadcast messages. The web interface shows staff activity and allows staff to be assigned to tasks. Staff can update task status and provide notes from their smartphones.
This solution has been added to the BeaconZone Solutions Directory where you can find more solutions that work with generic beacons.
We sometimes get asked for location beacons or which beacons are best for determining location. All beacons can be used for locating. While there are physical aspects such as battery size/life and waterproofing that make some beacons more suitable for some scenarios, locating capability is determined more by the software used rather than the beacons themselves.
Our article on Determining Location Using Bluetooth Beacons gives an overview on locating while the article on Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS) explains how RTLS work. If you wish to create your own locating software we have a large number of posts on RSSI.
If you have been attracted to Bluetooth by recent announcements on Bluetooth direction finding, be aware that no ready-made hardware or software solutions exist yet. It will take a while, perhaps years, before silicon vendors support Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding, silicon vendors create SDKs and hardware manufacturers create hardware.
Beacons are great for use with robots for use in determining extra contextual information. There’s recent research on Autonomous Navigation of an Indoor Mecanum-Wheeled Omnidirectional Robot Using Segnet (pdf) that uses iBeacons to determine a rough location of the robot.
The locating uses Kalman filtering and trilateration to get a fix for the robot.
If you want to learn more about using RSSI to determine robot location there’s also a presentation video Robot Localization using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons RSSI Measures by David Obregón Castellanos.
Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)
In our previous post on iBeacon Microlocation Accuracy we explained how distance can be inferred from the received signal strength indicator (RSSI). We also explained how techniques such as trilateration, calibration and angle of arrival (AoA) can be used to improve location accuracy.
There’s new research presented at The 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys ’19) by researchers from Nagoya University, Japan that looks into the use of AI machine learning to process Bluetooth RSSI to obtain location.
Their study was based on a large-scale exhibition where they placed scanning devices:
They implemented a LSTM neural network and experimented with the number of layers:
They obtained best results with the simplest machine learning model with only 1 LSTM:
As is often the case with machine learning, more complex models over-learn on the training data such that they don’t work with new, subsequent data. Simple models are more generic and work not just with the training data but with new scenarios.
The researchers managed to achieve an accuracy of 2.44m at 75 percentile – whatever that means – we guess in 75% of the cases. 2.44m is ok and compares well to accuracies of about 1.5m within a shorter range confined space and 5m at the longer distances achieved using conventional methods. As with all machine learning, further parameter tuning usually improves the accuracy further but can take along time and effort. It’s our experience that using other types of RNN in conjunction with LSTM can also improve accuracy.
If you want to view the research paper you need to download all the papers from the conference (zip) and extract p558-uranoA.pdf. Some of the other papers also make interesting, if not directly relevant, reading.
Read about AI Machine Learning with Beacons
There’s new research on a An Intelligent Low-Power Displaying System with Integrated Emergency Alerting Capability. The authors have implemented a wireless ePaper system showing static and dynamic information together with indoor locating based on Bluetooth beacons .
Unfortunately, the locating system is based on an empty room and the technique would be liable to fluctuations in the physical environment.
Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)
Owntracks is an open source app for iOS and Android that allows you to keep track of your (or vulnerable family member’s) location. However, it also has business uses to track valuable assets. You can also build a private location diary and share it with others.
It works with iBeacons to provide:
A mentioned in our post on location accuracy, two methods of improving accuracy are calibration and trilateration. There’s a recent research paper on iBeacon indoor localization using trusted-ranges model, that explores an alternative ‘trusted-ranges’ method. The method is still based on the RSSI measurements between the beacon and detector. It builds up a trusted-range model to describe how the RSSI varies over time and distance.
The model supplies reliable ranges of received signal strength values from nearest neighbours classifying received signal strength values into various levels of range. It performs better than calibration, especially at shorter ranges, while having a low complexity and hence computationally fast speed.
A problem with navigation in vehicles is that location can be lost in radio-shadows such as in tunnels and in tree covered areas. ChoonSung Nam and Dong-Ryeol Shin of Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea have a new paper on Vehicle location measurement method for radio-shadow area through iBeacon.
Beacons are placed at the side of the road and instead of advertising unique ids in the form of iBeacon or Eddystone, they advertise absolute Global Positioning System location data. Together with the received signal strength (RSSI) this allows the vehicle to better determine the location.
In our previous article iBeacon Microlocation Accuracy, we wrote about ways of using beacon RSSI to determine location. However, what if you were to use and combine beacon RSSI with other ways of locating to create a hybrid method? This is the topic of a new research Unsupervised Indoor Localization Based on Smartphone Sensors, iBeacon and Wi-Fi by Jing Chen Yi Zhang and Wei Xue of Jiangnan University, School of Internet of Thing Engineering, China.
The paper describes UILoc a system combining dead reckoning, iBeacons and Wi-Fi to achieve an average localisation error is about 1.1 m.
The paper also compares the trajectories obtained using different localisation schemes:
Motorola MOTOTRBO range two-way Radios can be used with the Motorola-supplied TRBOnet PLUS (pdf) control room software to show the location of workers with digital radios on maps and plans. The radios contain both GPS and iBeacon detection to allow locating indoors.
There are three places where iBeacons need to be set up in TRBOnet:
In the GPS profile:
Placing beacon on the map:
Are you an established 2-way radio company?
Contact us for advice on which beacons we have supplied for use with TRBONet.
Read the full User Guide
View compatible beacons