I want to build an android app for indoor navigation of a railway station. Is it possible through beacons? I was wondering if I can use beacons as a starting point reference and then use the accelerometer and other sensors to calculate speed and direction.
If I want to implement it through beacons, which beacons should I go for? Beacons with great development support would be preferred.
Esimote is the most used beacon.
You can write a program for it using Android beacon library as well.
Here in Stackoverflow questions need to be more direct and more code related.
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How to map in real time using indoor beacons on Android? Did tests using the SDK Estimote however, they do not have support for Android in indoor and do not have a method that returns the distance to the beacon.
With that, I'm using Alt SDK that returns me the distance.
But not her how to solve these doubts:
1) create a map (2D or 3D Google Maps type) with the location map of the inside of a room or shop for example.
2) show the location of the user's route to the beacon.
3) how to deal with the route to the beacon avoiding collision enters walls on the map?
4) how to locate the user's position in relation to beacons and know the position x, y or lat, long each beacon?
5) I saw this project trilateration but not your using to address the above questions.
6) need to use the GPS plus Bluetooth or just the Bluetooth solves?
I would recommend using one of the existing solutions, as this is a huge task that you're trying to achieve. I work for Proximi.io, that is a unified positioning platform. We provide beacon trilateration and showing your exact positioning on top of an indoor map based on that info. However, we don't have routing features. For that I would recommend checking out Steerpath, http://www.steerpath.com/. They specialize in beacon-based navigation, and deal with the wall issue.
Building an indoor navigation system is very complex. Beacon toolkits can tell you roughly how far you are from a stationary transmitter, but cannot tell you direction. It is just a tiny building block of a big system. A beacon is to an indoor navigation system as a brick is to a building.
You have brought up several important requirements and there are many others, including:
Building a system to record beacon positions in a known coordinate frame, and send them to your app
Transform beacon coordinate frame estimated positions to map coordinate frame for displaying a blue dot.
How to build such a system is simply beyond the scope of questions that can be answered properly on StackOverflow.
I have been working with Estimote Beacons for Android App Development. I'm getting beacons range and distance from Android. But, i want to show the directions and location of specific beacon to the user to reach specific beacons. So, is it possible to show the direction and location of beacon in Android app to reach to specific beacon?
Getting directional information to a beacon is much, much more difficult than simply getting a distance estimate.
A beacon by itself does not provide any directional information. It is simply a radio transmitter with which you can use the strength of the signal to get a rough estimate of the distance.
It is possible to do full indoor location of a mobile device using multiple beacon transmitters at known locations. Only if you know the specific location of the mobile device vs. the location of beacons can you do what you suggest. Doing this, however, requires sophisticated custom software, non-trivial site surveys, and beacon locations that do not change.
Several companies offer systems that do this, but none are free or open source, and it most certainly is not a core beacon feature.
I am using the RadiusNetworks library for measuring the distance to iBeacons. The official app from RadiusNetworks (iBeacon Locate) provides a calibration feature to improve accuracy.
How do I perform a calibration when using the library as part of my application?
Thanks & Best
ben
The calibration function in the BeaconScope app will give you a number to be configured into a hardware beacon to make distance estimates as accurate as possible. Once set, the beacon transmitter will emit this value to receiving devices (both Android or iOS). Because it is transmitted over the air, there is no need to manually configure the Android iBeacon Library with the value. The library will read it out of the beacon transmission.
For this to work, you need to configure the calibration power value into your beacon. How you do this depends on the type of beacon you are using. Most beacon vendors allow this, but each product has a different procedure. For my company's RadBeacon products, for example, we have iOS and Mac apps to set this value over the air.
It is hard to estimate the accurate distance using RSSI of the iBeacon.
You have to use log distance path loss model(shortly, LDPL) to change RSSI to distance.
In LDPL, you need below two parameters, simply.
Initial RSSI
Path loss exponent
And I recommend you BeaconBox for Android.
You can get these two parameters using this app.
Also, you can get Java source code for changing RSSI to distance.
I hope that you achieve the goal!
This is more of a theoretical question than the actual specific one.
I'm thinking about creating an app that would draw a 2D map of it's surroundings inside some sort of building/cave/etc depending only on it's sensors except of GPS (and Wi-Fi, too).
The only way to achieve this, at least I can think of at the moment, is trying to use some sort of microphone echolocation. Basically, trying to simulate sonar system. The problem is, there's very little literature and research about it.
So, what are the ways to draw a topographical map using mobile phone (iOS, Android preferably) sensors? Are there any libraries for that out there?
This thesis is about a research conducted to identify indoor positioning using sensors available in an Android device. Hope this will give you some support to your work.
I am developing an Android App to track indoor position. My phone is an Google Nexus S using two sensors, the first being an Accelerometer and the second being a Gyroscope.
My idea is that from a starting reference point (a known GPS position), using the 2 sensors (accelerometer for motion and Gyro for directions) track the phone when moving. And display on a map when the user is going.
But the problem is that i have no idea how to combine both of these sensors to give me an actual position?
I have read some article on internet that talk about "kalman filter" and after some more research i found out that that filter is very very complex /too much for me) especially to code it in java for Android (cpu killer)
Does someone has some experience that he can share with me about indoor positioning system using Gyro and accelerometer?
Gyros and accelerometers are not enough.
You get position by integrating the linear acceleration twice but the error is horrible. It is useless in practice.
Here is an explanation by (Google Tech Talk) at 23:20. I highly recommend this video.
As for indoor positioning, I have found these useful:
RSSI-Based Indoor Localization and Tracking Using Sigma-Point Kalman Smoothers
Pedestrian Tracking with Shoe-Mounted Inertial Sensors
Enhancing the Performance of Pedometers Using a Single Accelerometer
I have no idea how these methods would perform in real-life applications or how to turn them into a nice Android app.
A similar question is Calculating distance within a building.
I think this is a great post answering your question. This kalman filter combine data from accelerometers and gyros. Hope it helps.
For some other interesting reading on emerging indoor positioning technologies, check out this blog post from Qubulus. There are several startups and research projects trying to find a good replacement for GPS indoors. Attempts range from Dead Reckoning, to QR Codes, to light pulses, to radio fingerprinting. It looks like any viable solution will combine multiple technologies (similar to how most smartphones rely on A-GPS, where the satellite signal is assisted by cell tower multilateration).
Best of luck with your application!
I think it is too late for answer this question, but now, there is a good solution called iBeacon technology.
You can scan iBeacon devices by your smartphone, and you can get the rssi from iBeacon. So, you can calculate your position by those rssi.
To track indoor position starting from some reference point, only gyro and accelerometer is not enough. With accelerometer you can calculate speed, with gyro you can get direction of the mobile device, but to calculate indoor position you also need to have direction of movement, so for this case you need to use magnetic sensor. Such approach is called Dead Reckoning method and it's quite complex to combine all 3 sensors to get appropriate indoor position. Kalman filters allow you to smooth your measurement and filter some noise, but it's not the method to calculate indoor position. If you want to get indoor position you can try iBeacon approach and Trilateration method, there are some libraries (like this one) that already has this functionality, so you can try to investigate this method from such libs.