A Hybrid Indoor Location Positioning System

Indoor location positioning methods have experienced an impressive growth in recent years. A wide range of indoor positioning algorithms have been developed for various applications. In this work a new hybrid indoor location positioning technique is presented which utilizes smartphones and low cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags without any further infrastructure. The proposed method supports centimeter range positioning accuracy in its fine-positioning mode. The method includes coarse and fine location positioning. In the coarse positioning mode, a solution using received signal strength is employed while in the fine positioning mode an acoustic positioning technique is utilized. To ensure a high accuracy, the positioning system uses multilateration algorithm where only time synchronization between audio receivers is required. Experimental results using a commercially available BLE tags indicate that the proposed method, can determine indoor locations with less than 5 centimeters accuracy even in a noisy environment.