Use case scenario: Customer inside a large space/building (say an Airport or could a university campus, hospital, anything) has ordered food online (website? ..or would a Anroid/iOS be necessary so that we can extract device data such as a UUID?) using his own phone or tablet, to be delivered where he is.
But how can we locate exactly where he is? ..and I don't mean just in the room. If he is sitting at a table, to be able to find him....or rather find his device which chair it is at.
What would the requirements be to achieve this if the building had no beacons? Would UUIDs work? How could the device be found? I guess it would not be practical to install beacons all over the place eg. under seats, etc.
...and perhaps even create some sort of app for guiding the delivery person to where the customer is. ...just like a sat nav for cars, but within a large buidling. I realise that this latter part is a seperate question so please perhaps responding to this bit seperately.
I look forward to your suggestions and ideas.
They have an answer at many airports already- tablets on each table and they order through the tablet. Each tablet knows its table number and sends it with the order.
If you don't want to provide tablets at all the possible locations- then the answer is beacons. You want to know where a device is in a 2d field with very high accuracy. Wifi location is too uncertain, you can be off by 100m. GPS- if they enable it, and if its accurate indoors, and if the airport doesn't scramble it for security then its accurate to 10m or so, which is ok but not good enough to get food to a table. That leaves you with needing a short range location finder. Which is basically beacons.
A UUID won't help. Great, you can now uniquely identify the device- it gives you know info on where it is. To do that you need to compare yourself to a known point. That requires a known point(s) and a way of measuring how far from it you are and your direction from it. Which requires you to be able to detect it somehow by it giving off a signal. Which is a beacon.
Related
I would like to figure out how to locate a device by its connection strenght(dBm). Even if this don't give me a direct location, it could give me a radius of the device to the phone or the other way around. So far i've been able to gather the device name and RSSI "strenght" however, its a dynamic data i'm getting. I would like an continuously update of how good the strenght is. So the part I'm stuck on is getting the correct values(ive got -72dbm and -342654dbm form the tests) and i need updates every 3 second.
What you should really do is use the Android Beacon Library, it will work the distance out for you.
The actual calculation is very complex and this Library has been used by a lot of people since Radius Networks created it. The link is for the website downloads, but you can use gradle too.
It's easy to use and probably exactly what you're looking for
I'm trying to find a good way to track location of people in a building. I would ultimately like to be able to create a graphic on demand showing where employees are in a building - which floor (elevation), and where on the floor they are located (lat/lon). I have read that elevation is relative to the WGS84 ellipsoid, not sea level necessarily, which is fine. I can define a baseline of where the first floor is, for example, and then calculate the difference of a person's current location from there. If I understand correctly, the general precision lat/lon for a GPS is as fine as 1m, which should be sufficient for me.
Part of my problem is finding a device to use for employees to carry around. The other is finding a device with a supported API (read: "free API") or other programming options. I would like this to be manufacturer-independent.
I would love to do cross-platform development - iOS, Android, PC, web, etc.
Does anyone have experience with something like this, and what recommendations can you offer on where to start? I know this is a little open ended but I'm not sure where to start.
Thanks.
This all does not work (tracking within a building).
GPS Signal is very poor or non existent within a building.
(Next time search here on Stackoverflow. It has been asked some times.)
The only robust and working solution, are BlueTooth beacons.
Such small hardware pieces are mounted within the building.
Such beacons (search for iBeacon) just send out an id.
The phone receives the id, and the approximate distance to it.
You have to administrate and know which id is at which level of the building.
Even when having good reception the GPS signal is not precise enough to determine the floor a person is location.
Some phones have a barometer, like the ipHone, this can track relative heigh changes, and may be used to determine level within a building. (Once calibrated before entering the buulding)
how can I correctly identify if the user is driving or not ? I am trying to make an app where I can find my parked car's location.
The simplest way was to ask user to press a button after parking the car so that my app can remember its location.
But I want my app to be automatic. It should correctly recognize if the user is in vehicle or not without interacting with the user.
I tried out Activity Recognition as well but it does not give me exact/correct result. Even when I am walking it says driving and vice versa. I cannot trust it.
There are several apps in the play store which achieve this. I want to learn this as well.
Would some one take some time and help me out on this. It will be of greate help. Thanks a lot in advance :)
I've never done this before, but here are some things I'd try:
location - mainly, how fast their location is changing. probably not great for slow traffic, but if they are moving 60mph, there's no way they are walking. You could also combine this with map data about known roads, or maybe even use locations of well-known airports to know that someone is more likely flying than driving
use the device's accelerometers to compute it's speed (in conjunction with location info to correct for accumulated error).
have the user connect their device to the car with bluetooth - and then when the connection drops, you know they aren't in their car. Or better yet, figure out if you can just detect they are in the car from strength of the bluetooth signal. Though I'm not sure that's possible.
(maybe) ask your users to use a simple RFID chip in their car, and then use that as an indicator of whether or not the phone is in the car. Of course this has implications on the user experience.
in a different vein, maybe some sensor on the device could pick up vibrations? Just thinking that car rides aren't perfectly smooth, so any vibration sensing + some signal processing (DFT the data, then look for certain low frequencies that correspond to driving - probably low frequency and below audible).
The best? Probably a combination of all of the above. The more signals you can gather, the better. Perhaps you could even collect a bunch of data, and try to use it to train a classifier? Then again, if any one of these signals turns out to be strong enough, you might not need the others. Be sure to test a variety of scenarios, e.g. phone in the cup holder v. in your pocket, city driving & slow traffic v. highway driving / empty streets, etc.
I'd be curious to know if any of these ideas pan out.
Also fwiw, Determining if user is driving using gps appears relevant - though it's a simple speed-based check - if you cruise around a parking lot at 8mph looking for a spot, you'll completely fail at catching where the car is parked if your threshold is 10mph.
If the speed drops from above 40km/h to under 7km/h, and stays low for more than 5 minutes.
Is there any library that can help me determine one mobiles devices position in relation to other?
For example:
Can one iPhone determine that there is another one laying next to it and if so which way is it facing?
I don't know of a way to do what you are asking.
NFC requires the devices to basically touch. Wifi and GPS location services probably don't have the granularity to determine location to that precise level. It would probably be possible to use the location services to determine if two phones were in the same room (not table), and which location. I think in real world, this would with variable results, and not be feasible.
I wonder if the new Wifi Direct technologies provide anything like that.
On Android you can use Near Field Communication
After doing some asking around and reading, it sounds like you're lucky to get even within 10 meters of accuracy with a GPS on a mobile device (specifically Android).
I've seen a video that shows a home-made device reading out to several decimals. Is this only because of the data format from the chip? (aka, not really precise either?)
Is there any real working way that I can use an Android device to track real static positions within rooms in a building?
Ideally, I'd be able to mark a point in a room and come back to it later with virtually no drift.
The LocationProvider is different from each Android Device you are using. The SDK does not handle the calculation of your exact location but the phone does. But each device can have one or mare LocationProvider, thats why you need to set some Criterias when your picking a LocationProvider.
To get your exact position on the earth the GPS needs 3 points from 3 different satellites. Thats why the GPS works best in the open space. Regarding making a precise calculation on a static persion inside a building, this conflict with the whole scenario of the GPS-System. I'm not saying it's impossible to get a location inside a building but as with any other signals, obstacles that blocks the signal makes is weaker.
If you are inside a barn with thin walls this might work, but inside a 10 storage building your scenario seems quite impossible.
You can though force your phone to get the best LocationProvider and hopefully that will give you the most precise location. And yes, you can get inside 1-2m in precision outside.
I hope this helps a little. Enjoy your project.