Study of a hybrid algorithm for indoor positioning

Abstract

Today almost everyone has a device with positioning capabilities such as a smartphone, tablet, GPS tracking device or watch with built-in GPS. Positioning systems have played a major role in people’s lives since the required technology became publicly available in the 1990’s. In recent year, Indoor positioning technology has become commercially available in various forms and with varying levels of quality, unlikely the outdoor positioning system that is enabled by GPS satellite technology, there is still no perfectly proven indoor positioning method that satisfies all the required purposes. Each of the indoor positioning technologies has both strengths and weaknesses. Indoor positioning technologies differ in terms of accuracy, costs and efforts, but have improved quickly in the last couple of years. Bluetooth Low Energy is a universal low-power wireless standard that makes easy to connect a wide range of products including smart phones or tablets. This paper proposes an algorithm that enhances the accuracy and efficiency of an indoor positioning system by integrating the BLE positioning circle technique with the PDR technique using the IMU data of terminals. This study shows that the proposed technique improves the position accuracy to within 2.1m and enables its application to indoor navigation systems for very large spaces like airports and stadiums.