Indoor Localization with Bluetooth Beacons

The importance of the problem of Indoor Localization has grown tremendously as smartphones have become more ubiquitous and robots more intelligent. Solutions to this problem will greatly help users with location-based services indoors, and allow robots to become more autonomous in movement and navigation. Previous attempts have used a multitude of strategies, including signal fingerprinting, online and offline simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and estimating user location change using phone sensors, commonly the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass. In our research, we have: (i) characterized various properties of communication between Bluetooth beacons and smartphones (including effects of orientation, distance and environmental condition); (ii) performed user daily activity behavior analysis with Bluetooth beacons (placed in key locations around the Computer Science building); (iii) applied a variation of signal mapping to the collected data for location estimation